So what does your messenger/shoulder/camera bag says about you?

Crumpler: Williamsburg is the center of the universe and I have no problem paying $7 for a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon

Timbuk2: I’m too old for a Crumpler

Tenba: My other bag is a tote from the last PBS pledge drive and in this bag is my Blackberry, business cards, laptop, and a whole lot of messy unorganized paperwork

Lowepro: I will never go camping with this bag, but it looks good with the North Face gear I own, and to no coincidence, will never go camping with either

Billingham: My other bag carries my vintage golf clubs in the back seat of my restored 1965 Alfa Romeo Spider

Domke: How else am I to earn a Pulitzer?

f64: I’m old, my camera is old, my technique is old, and still think Ansel Adams was the messiah

Freitag: I think purchasing carbon credits and biodiesel are really good ways to exorcise my post-industrial bourgeois guilt

Tamrac: This was a real bargain – it came free with the deluxe camera kit and extended warranty I ordered online and saved a whopping $10 over the price at my local camera shop

National Geographic: My travel agent booked me on one of those lovely safari package holidays and as soon as I got back I sold every shred of that expensive photo gear I purchased for the trip except for this bag. Currently it wields nothing but an iPod and some magazines.

Chrome: I spent a lot of money to look like a homeless bike messenger. My NJS certified singlespeed has Phil Wood hubs and deep vee wheels, plus I have a tattoo of it on my leg

Jansport: Mommy bought this for me!

Manhattan Portage: Eeny-meeny-mine-moe, I picked the dullest bag, I know…

Kipling: My shoes are very important to me, that is why they spend half the day in this bag

Victorinox: I am an elitist douchebag who will buy anything European, just for the sake of it being European

Ortleib: Although, I make my commute on a bicycle year round in all weather conditions, I really hate biking

photo credit: Philgarlic

I briefly mentioned finders in my last rant. This has led me to my latest gripe – whatever happened to high-eyepoint viewfinders? Leica and Nikon finders pleasured a whole generation of sweaty, overweight, myopic photographers. You would think with the prevalence of these dim and tiny viewfinders attached to APS-C cameras, someone at Nikon would have though to pull an old F3 HP off the shelf and cram the finder onto a D300s.

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Dear Pentax and Nikon,

I applaud both of you for sticking with the lens mount system that has been carried through the transitions from manual focusing, to auto focusing; and from film to digital. Allowing photographers to mix older lenses with new ones in their optical libraries gives both of your systems an unparalleled advantage when it comes to the palette of lenses afforded to a shooter.

On the other hand, I am constantly fighting the urge to spit in your face the way you have spit in the face of every customer using a manual focus lens with an APS-C or full-frame digital SLR by not providing them with the option to use a split-image rangefinder or microprism focusing screen. Do you know how hard it is to accurately focus a Nikkor 50/1.2 AIs lens with a D300s? One has to have to bracket focus while squinting through the low magnification finder! And that focus confirmation dot is useless for any precision. Sure Katz Eye and some Asian junk peddlers offer some “void-‘yer-warranty” screens, but it is not the same. What is more aggravating is that it isn’t like Pentax or Nikon have never designed or don’t have the ability to manufacture these types of focusing screens. They have previously been present in their wares for decades.

Some of the current SLRs have interchangeable screens – as long as you like grid lines in addition to the standard matte. It is like offering unsweetened vanilla ice cream in addition to basic ice milk – there is a whole world of flavor out there Nikon and Pentax are missing out on. Many older lenses were better built and are better optical performers than their current counterparts. The Nikon 28mm/2.8 is a prime example of that, where the durable AIs version has eight elements in opposition to the plasticy D-type with six. What is the point of getting excited about the latest and greatest digital camera released if you can’t use it to its fullest extent?

Take a lesson from Leica – notice they didn’t replace the rangefinder of the M9 with a digital focus scale. They could have, but clearly they respected their core user group unlike you headache-inducing bastards.

Tersely yours,

Angry Photographer

A minor site update for the few who are still paying attention.

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Clearly I have been severely neglecting this website. The “Asides” note below is the sole reason beside my lack of traveling due to surgery repairing a knee injury (torn ACL, torn meniscus, fractured patella). In my downtime I have been formulating the next big thing that I have been none too subtly hinting at on this site. I’ve visited Costa Rica a few times before, the first was with my boarding school way back in 1994, but this visit last April was the first time I got to experience the lesser-known Caribbean coast. There I met some noteworthy characters down there including Tom Snyder and John Brickel, a pair better known through their own non-profit organization – Project Green Jungle.

After many years of formulating, John and Tom, accompanied by input from Jungle Brothers & Sisters like James Opdhal, Heather Trott, Jim Obert, Melissa Soro, and now myself, have conjured up a master plan to benefit the unrepresented and overlooked indigenous tribes of southern Costa Rica collectively known as the Bribri, all while furthering their own zoological goals. A result of living off the radar and suffering less governmental protection than the Costa Rican wildlife, the Bribri’s living conditions are extremely poor. Due to not being accounted for in official census statistics, the overall Bribri population estimates seem to range from ten to thirty thousand, with only a few thousand who still speak their native tongue.

So what does all of this have to do with me and the Packcamera website?

Well, after my return from Costa Rica six months ago, I began pondering if I could offer a workshop that emphasized backcountry and expedition skills alongside photographic instruction. I have lectured before on various subjects, consulted with individuals and small groups and disseminated what knowledge I’ve amassed, but always in small doses. So I had an array of thoughts banging around my head when Tom emailed me with this message:

John Brickel and friend

Just wanted to stop by and say hey.  Thought I would let you know we are planning our September trip to Costa Rica. Looking like a 2 week stay in Hitoy Cerere.  Let me know if you wanna come, man I guarantee you of some stuff you have never seen before.  If you cant make it in September, let me know what time of year is good for you and we will try to make the next trip then.  Really think you would enjoy the trip.

Hope things are going well.  We got a formal request from the government of Costa Rica to come back for the September trip so that is good.  Also working on a pretty big article on the water quality stuff.  Let me know how you are doing man…keep in touch,

Pura Vida,

It all went downhill after that…

I began conferencing and workshopping ideas with Tom and quickly realized my goals and their own could easily merge for our mutual benefits. We began outlining different expeditions that could be operated and organized by myself and Project Green Jungle, who were already well established in Costa Rica. Ultimately, these excursions aim to promote and fund PGJ’s social and ecological conservation efforts while utilizing several like-minded and eco-conscious experts in an genre of photography that is fairly under-appreciated. Collectively, we can establish a niche in the over-saturated photo workshop arena, that is unique and difficult to reproduce.

So without further prefacing, I would like to introduce GreenPhotoTours a collaboration with Project Green Jungle and myself. We aim to start offering expeditions, workshops and tours in late 2010 with some early trial runs in the spring of 2010.

I hope to have the website finalized with the full itinerary offerings outlined sometime in January. Finding a web developer on a limited budget is rather difficult. Green Jungle and I will be cross posting on each other sites from time to time, and together we will have some exciting collaborations planned including a raffle that will include a position on one of our springtime so-called ‘guinea pig’ tours, exclusive and limited-edition artwork, and rare indigenous Bribri artifacts.

So, essentially this is an announcement to proclaim ‘I’m back,’ and I will be kicking things off with an article which epitomizes what this site is really all about. So bookmark all our sites, subscribe to our feeds, and enjoy.

Why am I the only one who seems to be irritated by the naming and marketing of some nebulous and generally intangible “processing engine” by the big digital camera manufacturers. What in the name of all that is holy is EXPEED, Bionz, Exmor, Digic, TruePic, or PRIME aside from a slew of camel cased, conglomeration of marketing double-speak and unpronounceable terms and acronyms? Why do these marketing concepts appear in specification fields? This idiocy should not be tolerated in any way by the customer trying to purchase an item that for 90% of the public is the unnecessary, job-unrelated acquisition of a camera. What alarms me a great deal is the fact that this fluff has the ability of spawn. Digic’s genealogy spews back four generations and I’ll be dammed to tell the difference between the first and the last… I’m just hoping that this nonsensical nomenclature does not jump genres. I don’t require a microwave with Nuk’r IV technology, a sneaker with Shoelace 2.0, nor a pencil with the GraFite Processing Engine. If there is a term or number attached to a product’s description, it had better be a quantifiable, standardized and comparable specification, otherwise get it out of my face.

The Nikonos was the underwater camera for decades. I owned a Nikonos II that was well known for being able to survive a flooding or two. I the days of film, more advanced divers and watersport photographers would invest in a housing for their SLRs, while the vacationer usually had a waterproof disposable camera or a basic waterproof underwater camera to choose from. But the mid range was dominated by Nikonos, and the sales of these cameras dwarfed the high- and low-end underwater/waterproof markets. Judging by the plethora of Nikonoses still in circulation on eBay, there is still a viable market to be addressed.

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At times I have taken a bit of a snippy, snarky, or snide tone to some of the subjects I have discussed on this site. These remarks are actually toned down from the raging vehement diatribe that flows from my id-driven core. Well, Freud could have a field day with what I am about to do, and that is to give that bitter voice a platform under the guise of another author for this site. Meet Angry Photographer – then immediately proceed to hide your children, adorn a helmet, and fasten your seatbelt.