cmedin
Well-known
Where's the option for "Buying more because there are great bargains to be had"? 
ChrisPlatt
Thread Killer
That would be my vote too.
I just hope all my new gear is edible when I'm broke too...
Chris
Roger Hicks
Veteran
Actually, Roger this reminds me of another option I may need to revisit: although I adore the Alpa (I drool when I go to their website), an economical alternative is the Fotoman 6x9 - not a 6x6 like the SWC - but an interesting alternative nonetheless (since we're talking economics here).
Widest lens they offer is the Schneider 38/5.6 Super Angulon XL. I don't know anything about that lens though.
(Sorry if we're going off-topic
- Ray
Dear Ray,
Fotoman cameras improve by leaps and bounds, and they weren't bad to begin with. Their 6x9 isn't as convenient to hold as an Alpa, but as you say, it's a lot cheaper, and I find it more comfortable than the SWC.
I've not tried the 38 XL, but Frances's standard lens on 6x9 Alpa is the 35/5.6 Apo Grandagon, and it's gorgeous. I'd be surprised if the 38 XL were significantly inferior. We have the 47 and 58 XLs and they're superb.
And this isn't really off topic. Clearly some people's buying has not been affected very much, while others are snapping up second-hand bargains.
Cheers,
R.
Roger Hicks
Veteran
monochromejrnl
Well-known
Roger - this is getting off topic and although I don't own nor have I used an Alpa, I have a SWC which I use on a tripod 50% of the time... the balance of the time I use it mounted to an aftermarket grip with a cable release and find some of the disadvantages you mentioned above well mitigated with a $50 grip... i'm sure the Alpas are fine cameras I just can't afford one (not now, not before the downturn and not even before I had a little daughter to save for)... ;P
Roger Hicks
Veteran
Sure, don't get me wrong. The SWC is an excellent camera, and I have no doubt that you are right about the grip/cable release approach. I was just a bit surprised at Olsen's calling it one of the best cameras ever made. One of the finest lenses, yes. A very good camera wrapped around it, yes. Just not 'one of the best cameras ever made'.
Cheers,
Roger
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monochromejrnl
Well-known
Roger, I would whole heartedly agree with you on that... the lens is stunning but the body can but unfortunately will never be improved up... best I could do (and the advantages are significant) was to use an aftermarket grip and cable release...
too bad we don't see more Alpas in garage sales ;P
MickH
Well-known
My gear budget has dropped to zero. I'll just have to bear with that GR1n lust for a while unless I unload some stuff to fund the purchase.
NickTrop
Veteran
I think we all have that dream.
I'm a bight of a skinflint myself, like I could never bring myself to buy a new car.. Never.. Last car I bought was 10 years old, in very good mechanical condition, a few months ago someone bumped into the front of it and scraped it a fair bit, the poor chaps brand new little compact shattered its bumper and bent the bonnet, I had a few scrapes, He offered me £250 there and then to not call it in, I got suspicious and checked him for alchohol, when he seemed clean and genuinly just did not want to lose his no claims, I took his £250. The scrapes are still on my Volvo, I spent the money on a lens and a brick of film.
I buy clothes that look almost new in charity shops and wear it till it falls apart or don't fit anymore, in the latter case I give it back to the charity shops (I buy underwear and socks new, there are limits, most charity shops don't carry that anyway)
//Jan
Ditto that, m'friend. I'm cheap in the best of times when I have some dough to blow! That's why I'm a fixed lens RF guy and not a "Leica" chap. (No offense to Leica chaps...) Are there some cameras I wouldn't mind ownin'? Sure. An Oly 35 SP, a Retina II, perhaps. A Contax G. No gas - can live w/o them. Would I buy one or two of them? Only if it was a super sweet deal... or "a find". How much is that old film camera? That - how do you say it? Cone-tax G? Give ya $15 to take it off your hands, sport, but only if it comes with the lens... I gotta be nuts for buying this, I use a Canon G5 digital, but it would make a cool paperweight...
Actually, I might thin the herd a little. Thinking of selling my Kiev 60 and lens collection, an El Nikkor enlarger lens, maybe. 35/2.8 Flectogon, some other classic M42s I don't use. Maybe the Yash CC... Dunno.
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NickTrop
Veteran
I think we all have that dream.
I'm a bight of a skinflint myself, like I could never bring myself to buy a new car.. Never.. Last car I bought was 10 years old, in very good mechanical condition, a few months ago someone bumped into the front of it and scraped it a fair bit, the poor chaps brand new little compact shattered its bumper and bent the bonnet, I had a few scrapes, He offered me £250 there and then to not call it in, I got suspicious and checked him for alchohol, when he seemed clean and genuinly just did not want to lose his no claims, I took his £250. The scrapes are still on my Volvo, I spent the money on a lens and a brick of film.
I buy clothes that look almost new in charity shops and wear it till it falls apart or don't fit anymore, in the latter case I give it back to the charity shops (I buy underwear and socks new, there are limits, most charity shops don't carry that anyway)
//Jan
Ditto that, m'friend. I'm cheap in the best of times when I have some dough to blow! That's why I'm a fixed lens RF guy and not a "Leica" chap. (No offense to Leica chaps...) Are there some cameras I wouldn't mind ownin'? Sure. An Oly 35 SP, a Retina II, perhaps. A Contax G. No gas - can live w/o them. Would I buy one or two of them? Only if it was a super sweet deal... or "a find". How much is that old film camera? That - how do you say it? Cone-tax G? Give ya $15 to take it off your hands, sport, but only if it comes with the lens... I gotta be nuts for buying this, I use a Canon G5 digital, but it would make a cool paperweight...
Actually, I might thin the herd a little. Thinking of selling my Kiev 60 and lens collection, an El Nikkor enlarger lens, maybe. 35/2.8 Flectogon, some other classic M42s I don't use. Maybe the Yash CC... Dunno. Like many others - I've amassed lenses, and bodies that are perfectly fine, some somewhat rare, seemingly sought-after. But apart from being cheap, I'm also lazy when it comes to sellin' stuff. Sometimes it ain't worth the hassle.
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Steve Bellayr
Veteran
Hasn't been good for my photography but not for any of the reasons above. My local supermarket has dicounted their wines by more than 50%. With prices under $5 a bottle my drinking time has gone way up and is cutting into my photo time.
Al Kaplan
Veteran
I wish the price of restaveks would drop. My darkroom is getting as messy as my house.
Olsen
Well-known
They are difficult to hold, have no built in light meter, the release is hard and difficult to control. Indeed. But that this Biogon lense should work so much better on an Alpa is new to me. I have never enlarged SWC negs in a analogue enlarger, - the old way of checking the optics. But I have a Nikon 8000ED on which I have looked through many negatives from my SWC. It is difficult to imagine that it can be done better. But I know that the Alpa camera has smaller tollerances and possibly flatter film surface. So, I cannot exclude that.
dave lackey
Veteran
Hmmm...glad to see not too many people in my shoes.
I have reduced my photo budget by 90% and sold the S3 2000 with much more Nikon gear and my studio equipment up for sale. Not sure if even THAT will get me to January but we'll see...
Oh, yeah, Steve....you're givin' me some baaaad ideas....LOL..but without a car, I can't get a DUI....
Wait a minute, what's a drunk bicyclist charged with besides HUA?
I have reduced my photo budget by 90% and sold the S3 2000 with much more Nikon gear and my studio equipment up for sale. Not sure if even THAT will get me to January but we'll see...
Oh, yeah, Steve....you're givin' me some baaaad ideas....LOL..but without a car, I can't get a DUI....
Wait a minute, what's a drunk bicyclist charged with besides HUA?
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thomasw_
Well-known
I am buying darkroom equipment currently. This has resulted in some good deals for me, particularly as regards an old Leitz focomat 1c enlarger: the item was free; how cool is paying just the cost of shipping? Otherwise I have no interest in obtaining any camera gear in the next year or two. I am focussing on 35mm film exclusively. In a year or two I will look at a spending some saved cash to obtain an enlarger for 6x6 and a Rollei 2,8F. Happily, I am quite content with my gear currently.
maddoc
... likes film again.
Two weeks ago, I also received an enlarger (Durst M601 with color head CL66) for a very low fee and now I am thinking about how to use our bathroom temporarily as an darkroom.
Except for that tempting M2 (where I got weak thanks to ThomasW, vieri, TomA, and Al Kaplan
) I have no intention to buy new equipment. What I have is already to much and I am more thinking about reducing the amount of gear...
eli griggs
Well-known
how about a long maybe?
how about a long maybe?
As it is for many here, this year monies are extra tight. My Rozeanns' employer has cut back staff and those that have stayed are on 35 hours instead of 40 and no overtime. She's picked up a few hours working for our eldest son on weekends, but that still falls short. On the plus side, we're enjoying more time together in the afternoons during the week and I was able to buy her some inexpensive lenses locally last week for the Minolta I gave her awhile back. Of course, that was only after a few days of heavy winds took all the lovely colors off the trees along our daily walking route; did I really just write 'lovely'?:bang:.
Whatever cash I get to spend on photography in the foreseeable is going for essentials... film, a few chemicals for mixing my own chemistries and the wrapping up some long term projects. Consequently, I've turned more and more to trades. This year I was able to trade a vintage Contax RF lens for a Canon FD lens I wanted plus some little cash, and I've swapped some of my own artwork and that of others for RF camera kit.
Right now, I'm offering mostly art work for gear instead of buying, looking for LTM stuff and whatever else I can find that does something positive for my kit. I could have waited for some of this stuff but after a consideration, I took the decision to give trading a big push. I've not been shy approaching folks about trades and so far no one has been nasty about it, though a few may not reply to email inquires but then that happens sometimes when one offers less than the asking price, LOL. Trading is one of the big pluses about RFF and truth be told, there are so many trades going on here at anyone time that even if the economy tanked completely, it might not ever be noticed if the volume of trading here were to be used as an index.
I also actively look for free or cheap gear.
I've been putting together darkroom kit on the cheap for, I guess, a couple of years now and it's been a mixed bag of free and bought kit all the way. The bought stuff has been very inexpensive, gas money cheap really, considering what it cost to go and get it, especially this last few months, and even then I've received twice over as much quality free stuff from some of the sellers as I bought.
About the only things my darkroom lacks now that I can't build myself but still want, is a color analyzer, hopefully a PM2L, a few better enlarger lenses for 35, 6x9 and 4x5 - 5x7 formats and some sort of developer set-up, like a Nikor tank and reel, for 4x5. I shoot, process and can print from 16mm to 4x5 (with a 5x7 in the way off future, if I persist). Other than bulbs, I hope to never need any other enlarger kit again.
I do keep my fingers crossed I can find a cheap or free dry-mounting press locally soon and I'm more than certain I'll have to layout cash for a good, wall-mounted mat-cutter at some point next year.
I'll tell you up front, I've got way more enlarger on my bench than I ever needed, but I wanted to try several types of light sources, so I now have a old Omegalight cold-lighthead on an Omega E-6 5x7, a Leitz Valloy II for 35mm, a 23c II(I) with a color head, the M600 I started out with from ebay and an Omega B66 pro I want to convert to a point source light.
And I'm not finished looking yet, if I can find a free, older Leitz 35/6x6 to replace the Durst, that I'll just use for medium format only. Excessive I know, but it's my sandbox and I want to play.
So far my DR equipment costs have been less than $400 - $500, including plumbing and materials for the bench, sink frame, granite baseboard for my Leitz, etc. and that's a total spread out over a couple of years.
Because I'm also setting up my sister and one of her daughters with their own darkroom, hopefully in the next few months after her oldest girls' wedding, all the 'spare' kit I've assembled is finding some use elsewhere, so I'm really putting together 2 complete darkrooms on this budget.
Likewise, I've run ads looking for free camera kit of any type on a regular basis on both Craigslist and Freecycle, although I can't think off-hand of any that I gotten free that way. I'll continue to run the requests though, there are always folks than want their stuff to be used, not half forgotten on a closet shelf and ignored by their kids as useless artifacts.
A case in point is the nice Yashica XL Super with lenses a V.A. nurse mailed me after asking if I enjoyed photography during a medical interview where she saw the Leica IIIc I was toting. She had gone to some trouble a few years back to drive up to Boone, NC to buy these but never really used them. I'm enjoying trying to find m42 lenses to fill out the system, to teach my niece with, and in the meantime I've lent it out to my neighbor who was wanting to see if he'd like film photography as a hobby,(I think he'll be retiring soon).
These last few months, I've found some good values in small common cameras, the XA2 I posted about the other night is a good example, $3.12, with flash and working batteries, it's now is ready to go with fresh light seals. Likewise a Canon QL17, 2ed model for... I forget... pocket change from a guy that rides the bus.
Of course, I did buy the Leica IIIc with 28 mm Color Skopar and viewfinder from a RRF member this last year but that was my biggest single expenditure in years and worth every cent in pure satisfaction.
So back to the orignal question, for Rozeann and I the economy has take it's toll in most areas of our lives together, but with regard to photography, we're doing ok, but thanks for asking.
Eli
how about a long maybe?
As it is for many here, this year monies are extra tight. My Rozeanns' employer has cut back staff and those that have stayed are on 35 hours instead of 40 and no overtime. She's picked up a few hours working for our eldest son on weekends, but that still falls short. On the plus side, we're enjoying more time together in the afternoons during the week and I was able to buy her some inexpensive lenses locally last week for the Minolta I gave her awhile back. Of course, that was only after a few days of heavy winds took all the lovely colors off the trees along our daily walking route; did I really just write 'lovely'?:bang:.
Whatever cash I get to spend on photography in the foreseeable is going for essentials... film, a few chemicals for mixing my own chemistries and the wrapping up some long term projects. Consequently, I've turned more and more to trades. This year I was able to trade a vintage Contax RF lens for a Canon FD lens I wanted plus some little cash, and I've swapped some of my own artwork and that of others for RF camera kit.
Right now, I'm offering mostly art work for gear instead of buying, looking for LTM stuff and whatever else I can find that does something positive for my kit. I could have waited for some of this stuff but after a consideration, I took the decision to give trading a big push. I've not been shy approaching folks about trades and so far no one has been nasty about it, though a few may not reply to email inquires but then that happens sometimes when one offers less than the asking price, LOL. Trading is one of the big pluses about RFF and truth be told, there are so many trades going on here at anyone time that even if the economy tanked completely, it might not ever be noticed if the volume of trading here were to be used as an index.
I also actively look for free or cheap gear.
I've been putting together darkroom kit on the cheap for, I guess, a couple of years now and it's been a mixed bag of free and bought kit all the way. The bought stuff has been very inexpensive, gas money cheap really, considering what it cost to go and get it, especially this last few months, and even then I've received twice over as much quality free stuff from some of the sellers as I bought.
About the only things my darkroom lacks now that I can't build myself but still want, is a color analyzer, hopefully a PM2L, a few better enlarger lenses for 35, 6x9 and 4x5 - 5x7 formats and some sort of developer set-up, like a Nikor tank and reel, for 4x5. I shoot, process and can print from 16mm to 4x5 (with a 5x7 in the way off future, if I persist
). Other than bulbs, I hope to never need any other enlarger kit again.I do keep my fingers crossed I can find a cheap or free dry-mounting press locally soon and I'm more than certain I'll have to layout cash for a good, wall-mounted mat-cutter at some point next year.
I'll tell you up front, I've got way more enlarger on my bench than I ever needed, but I wanted to try several types of light sources, so I now have a old Omegalight cold-lighthead on an Omega E-6 5x7, a Leitz Valloy II for 35mm, a 23c II(I) with a color head, the M600 I started out with from ebay and an Omega B66 pro I want to convert to a point source light.
And I'm not finished looking yet, if I can find a free, older Leitz 35/6x6 to replace the Durst, that I'll just use for medium format only. Excessive I know, but it's my sandbox and I want to play.
So far my DR equipment costs have been less than $400 - $500, including plumbing and materials for the bench, sink frame, granite baseboard for my Leitz, etc. and that's a total spread out over a couple of years.
Because I'm also setting up my sister and one of her daughters with their own darkroom, hopefully in the next few months after her oldest girls' wedding, all the 'spare' kit I've assembled is finding some use elsewhere, so I'm really putting together 2 complete darkrooms on this budget.
Likewise, I've run ads looking for free camera kit of any type on a regular basis on both Craigslist and Freecycle, although I can't think off-hand of any that I gotten free that way. I'll continue to run the requests though, there are always folks than want their stuff to be used, not half forgotten on a closet shelf and ignored by their kids as useless artifacts.
A case in point is the nice Yashica XL Super with lenses a V.A. nurse mailed me after asking if I enjoyed photography during a medical interview where she saw the Leica IIIc I was toting. She had gone to some trouble a few years back to drive up to Boone, NC to buy these but never really used them. I'm enjoying trying to find m42 lenses to fill out the system, to teach my niece with, and in the meantime I've lent it out to my neighbor who was wanting to see if he'd like film photography as a hobby,(I think he'll be retiring soon).
These last few months, I've found some good values in small common cameras, the XA2 I posted about the other night is a good example, $3.12, with flash and working batteries, it's now is ready to go with fresh light seals. Likewise a Canon QL17, 2ed model for... I forget... pocket change from a guy that rides the bus.
Of course, I did buy the Leica IIIc with 28 mm Color Skopar and viewfinder from a RRF member this last year but that was my biggest single expenditure in years and worth every cent in pure satisfaction.
So back to the orignal question, for Rozeann and I the economy has take it's toll in most areas of our lives together, but with regard to photography, we're doing ok,
but thanks for asking.Eli