Down the Road

Photographs and stories by Jim Grey

Since 2007

Recommended reading

Jim Grey
9 comments on Recommended reading
1 minute

💻 I once worked for a software company with a product everyday people used. The longer I worked there, the more we changed the product so that it would subtly lead people to consume it more, which led to more money in our pockets. Seth Godin writes about a subtle change that Amazon is making that is much the same, and reflects on companies that serve their customers vs. seeing them as a cash bag to be squeezed. Read For customers vs. to customers

Home sweet home
Kodak Baby Brownie, Efke 100, 2015

💻 Shawn Granton follows up on the theme from the article above by sharing his experience with online selling/storefront platforms — and how they treated him like a moneybag to be squeezed. Read On my experiences with online retail platforms

📷 Christopher Pattison takes a deep dive look at the Kodak Baby Brownie, which (it turns out) was the first all-Bakelite camera. I owned one; see its review here. Chris goes the extra mile in his writeup, however. Read Kodak Baby Brownie

📷 The Nikon F3 is an uncontested classic and pillar of the old-camera hobby. Alyssa Chiarello has one now, and gives it a solid review. Read The Nikon F3 – Greatest Legendary Classic

📷 Emma Lloyd at Analogue Wonderland offers good advice for packaging your film when you send it to a lab for processing. Read The Essential Guide to Sending Film for Development: Dos and Don’ts

Sign up for my monthly email to get an insider view of what I’m working on! Sign up here.

Comments

9 responses to “Recommended reading”

  1. Alex G. Avatar
    Alex G.

    Cory Doctorow’s ‘enshittification cycle’ explains a lot of what we see in online platforms, https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

    Reply
    1. adventurepdx Avatar
      adventurepdx

      That’s a good read. It explains how Etsy search works so well: Put in a basic search term, and you’re going to get more ad-based listings tertiarily linked to what you are looking for than what you’re actually looking for.

      Reply
    2. Jim Grey Avatar
      Jim Grey

      You’re the second person this week to point me to that article!

      Reply
  2. Andy Umbo Avatar
    Andy Umbo

    Aly’s review of the Nikon F3 is interesting, but I think that most camera people would think the F2 to be the pinnacle of the Nikon camera line, as the last horizontal focal plane mechanical camera. I think all of Nikons decisions concerning camera features and development, make some sort of sense when you think about it, but I think most professionals were looking for the next camera after the F2 to be an all mechanical body with the form factor of the F3, i.e. an internal light meter not dependent on a large interchangeable prism head, something accomplished, of course, by the Canon F1, and even as far back as the Miranda Sensorex, which had an internal body meter with interchangeable prisms and finders. Of course, Nikon had offerings like the FM, but the difference in construction quality, the less than long term dependability of the vertical focal plane shutter, and the not very calculated resizing, which made mounting lenses while on a tripod (where the thin margin between the bottom of the camera, and the lens controls, jammed the lenses into a lot of tripod mounting plates), kind of made those cameras out of the running. I can honestly remember the introduction of the Nikon F3, as well as professionals migrating to manual mechanical down line models like the FM, being the beginning of us talking about cameras being more as a disposable tool, rather than something you’d keep CLA’ing and keep in rotation.

    Reply
    1. Jim Grey Avatar
      Jim Grey

      And yet the F3 has proved to be robust and reliable.

      Reply
      1. Andy Umbo Avatar
        Andy Umbo

        More so than people thought they would have been! At the time, it was “electronically controlled shutter”? Nahhhh. Not particularly wrong thinking, as there are legions of cameras from that era, especially Canons like the AE-1, whose internal electronics have all gone kaput, never to be revived. My audio compadres will tell you similar about 70’s-80’s high end electronics and stereo equipment. I had a pal with a beautiful Teac 10.25 inch reel-to-reel that was acting up, and the only way he could fix it was that he worked at a radio station (x-DJ-now in sales), and one of the high end engineers took it on as a favor and was actually desoldering and resoldering new parts into circuit boards! He said anything that was integrated circuit, was unfixable unless there were replacement NOS IC’s, otherwise, it was a boat anchor!

        Reply
  3. adventurepdx Avatar
    adventurepdx

    Thanks for the shout-out, Jim!

    Reply
    1. Jim Grey Avatar
      Jim Grey

      👌👍

      Reply
  4. Andy Umbo Avatar
    Andy Umbo

    Unfortunately, I quit selling on online services like eBay. I divested myself of a lot of odds and ends in the early 00’s, but now, policies like capturing money for income taxes that you may not owe, at the behest of the govt., and giving them access to do this in your accounts, is folly. I consider eBay to be a yard sale, I’m not in the photo equipment business, and I can say I’ve virtually “lost” money on everything Ive ever sold on there, that is, got less for the item than I initially paid for it years ago, I was just getting rid of it. I certain haven’t kept bills from thirty years ago to prove this; but that doesn’t mean that any money I received on there is “income” to be taxed! eBay did their users a wild disservice by not creating a system of listing yourself as a commercial or retail entity, and getting taxed accordingly vs. just a person having a yard sale!

    I’m now sitting on a ton of photographic odds and ends that I expected to sell in retirement, and make possibly a few hundred a month, until it was gone of, which I will no longer do. In the late 90’s, I got in a jam of moving across the country to a new job rather rapidly, and ended up boxing a lot of stuff and letting KEH give me a check for the whole thing. I don’t think “rape” is too strong a word to use for what happened, but that is certainly not a solution any more either, that why eBay was such a godsend. I recall KEH giving me ten bucks for mint condition Canon FTb’s that had already recently been CLA’d . A travesty. Sure, they need to make an income, but I remember small used photo dealers back in the 80’s that used to sell high end stuff for about 10 percent more than they paid you for it, and only dearth in Leica, Hasselblad, and a few others.

    Anyway, no solution anymore that I can see!

    Reply

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: