RolleiCord (CC: Camerafiend)

My most recent camera purchase was an early model Stereo Realist from 1951. For my birthday though, I wound up with something much more current. I figure three years newer is enough. My latest camera is a Rolleicord IV from 1954. I’ve wanted a beautiful Medium Format camera for a bit to use in the studio and in nature.

What is medium format? Without getting too technical, medium format takes a 6×6cm sized negative. It’s much larger than those taken by a normal 35mm. Now there are many flavors of cameras that can take smaller or larger sized images on the medium format film but 6×6 is certainly the standard.

The camera was purchased off Craigslist for $200. This marks my second Craigslist purchase with good success. The photographer selling it was actually running a roll through it as I knocked on his door. You’ve got to love that sort of dedication and he was thrilled when I told him that it would be used and well cared for. I wouldn’t want such a beautiful camera collecting dust either! He was selling it to make some extra cash and he was offloading some less-used gear. As I left he asked if I had any film for it, when I said no he gave me two rolls of Kodak Panatomic-X film, rated at 32 ISO and expired way back in 1986. I thanked him and was on my way.

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Every year around this time I lock myself in a tiny room and work on the year’s photos. Triple checking my backups, moving older files  to off-site drives and making sure my Lightroom catalogs are up to date. Lightroom gives me some interesting statistics that I figured I would share, I would be interested in seeing what everyone else comes up with – if anyone else out there is geeky enough to even worry about checking such statistics..

In 2008 I shot 22,209 (18124 in 2007, a 19% increase) images totaling 217GB (131 in 2007, a 40% increase) of hard drive space.

On my 50D which was released in the beginning of October I have 5,000 images, but my workhorse 20D’s are near 7,000 a piece. My 10D is dwindling further into non-existence with 1,500 images. The Canon G9 took near 1,000 images.

My lens of choice was my 70-200 2.8 IS ‘L’ lens with over 11,000 images, that’s half of my photos. I used my 100mm 2.8 Macro lens the least with 76 images, 24-70 2.8 ‘L’ saw 3,000 images and surprisingly my 10-22mm EF-S shot 1,200 images.

My favorite aperture was 2.8 with 7,000 photos. Favorite shutter speed was 1/250 (understandable since I worked with a lot of studio and strobe this year). My favorite ISO of choice is ISO 200 at 5,600 images, 100 at 4,700 images and only 52 images using the 50D’s ISO 12800 setting. And all of those ISO 12800 images were probably just too grainy to be worth anything.

I shoot landscape more than portrait – 13,000 to 9,000. I shoot the least amount of images in the cold month of January at 66 and the most this year was in October thanks to the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta trip and a wedding the weekend afterward.

Have you posted your usage statistics somewhere? Link to them below!

-J

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Completely off-topic, but I’ve been wowed by some of the toys this holiday season. Usually toys nowadays are cheap flimsy hunks of plastic that will end up in a landfill before 2010. Others are padded in 4″ of foam in an over-protective attempt at something that falls flat of actually being fun. Then, there are the toys that I wish I had when I was a kid..

Here’s a list of the top ten things I would love for Christmas 2009 if I were a kid.

Eyeclops Night Vision Goggles

1. EyeClops Night Vision Infrared Stealth Goggles, $49.99 – Night vision goggles, how cool is that? Sure the quality is probably not too great but to a kid? The holy grail of toys, even if it only retains its ‘cool’ value for a few days.

2. Flip Video Ultra Series Camcorder, $129.00 – What kid wouldn’t want to want to make their own videos with this little Flip Video 60 minute camcorder? Sure, the video quality is most likely low but good enough for YouTube or Flickr. Low-fi video is big too – remember the PXL 2000 from the 90’s?? That video camera recorded onto cassette tapes… Look at the PXL 2000 now, fetches almost $200 in working condition on eBay! Low-fi, that’s what they want.

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