Tina and camera shutters

This is Tina, a favorite dog of mine long ago gone off to the happy hunting grounds in the sky. She was a lovely creature.

She would trust me to the end of the earth. This was my apartment as teenager.

 

The photo is terrible. It's old. Very old. And I cannot even recall which camera I used. 

I was given a vintage Argus C3 to play around with in High School. I learned the numbers by that camera. I knew what the numbers meant but I hadn't internalized what I knew. It was always maths and never intuition. I took mostly b/w photos and developed them myself. And that's where I learned how much of the art is actually in the developing, the darkroom, as much as the actual negative. It's important as taking a great shot in the first place. Guys like Ansel Adams spent as much time in the darkroom producing variations as he did scouting sites and setting up his shots. 

This must have been my dad's camera I borrowed all the time, a Yashica FX2, much easier to use.

Although I don't remember it, I deduce the photo of Tina was taken with the Yashica because it's in color. 

Both of these cameras have shutters that look like the designs on James Bond movie posters. They look like aperture setting fins of modern lenses. The apertures themselves move. Stated differently they look like the aperture setting is the size of the hole that is set for the middle of the shutter fins. The shutter fins will all slide open to the aperture setting and then shut. 

Here is a YouTube video of an Argus shutter. In High School I found this movement fascinating. The video shows only one shutter movement at the beginning. All the rest of the video is dead air. So if you want to see two or three, then replay after the first one.

YouTube Argus shutter release

Lenses for Nikon digital SLR, probably all modern lenses, have fins similar to these. The lenses do, not the camera. The number of fins varies, and then the number of fins for the lens aperture determines the shape of the bokeh speck reflections that the lens produces. More fins, then the rounder the little out-of-focus spots of glittering colored light that appear in the out-of-focus areas. 

While their shutters are completely different. The shutter is an actual shutter constructed of horizontal blades or panels blocking the camera's sensor. With a mirror blocking the view of the shutter. The mirror must get out of the way, then the shutter of hair-thin panels slams opens then shuts and the mirror returns to position. This top to bottom movement of the camera's shutter allows for some very adept manipulation by skillful photographers. Some camera's advanced features allow adjustments to this top and bottom allowance of light. 

YouTube video Inside a camera, the Slow Mo Guys.

I'm really glad the Slow Mo guy explained the paint splatters on his camera. I just now wrote to a friend and relayed my appreciation for my Nikon. I've abused my camera inexcusably this same way as this guy and it just keeps taking great photos. Much better photos than I did way back then with my old film cameras and my dogs and without any real clue about how to work with light. That photo up there is backlit. I'm impressed there is any tonality to the dog's black coat. Usually the dogs photograph as black ink blots. And there is no light nor color to the interior room. The camera's settings were for the light outside. Not for the light inside. This is a very common error that amateur photographers make. Your point-and-shoot camera will most likely have a setting for this backlit situation. In that case the camera mathematically averages bright and dark areas and provides a compromise between them. So at least some detail in darkness is saved. 

With modern cameras, though, as with earlier darkroom work, mid tones can be adjusted post processing by programs such as Photoshop so long as the original full raw file is saved. Usually though, amateur photographers will accept the camera's own processing to save camera memory space. the cameras do an excellent job of it. 

Professionals save their raw files so they can make these types of adjustments themselves. There is much more information available to manipulate using raw files. Then after that manipulation the photos are reduced to manageable size for printing and for computer displays. I could do much better adjusting the scan file of my dog if I had the raw digital information. Alas, the photo was taken a decade before digital cameras became widespread. There is only so much can be done with a poorly taken original film photo. Such a shame. Tina deserves better treatment than this.