A Camera and an Eye, Both One of a Kind

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

FORGET what your parents told you: money does grow on trees. Well, at least for the street photographers who work the crowds around the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, it does. With digital cameras and ink-jet printers powered by car batteries, they churn out images at about $10 a pop.

Multimedia

Polaroid Photographer

Louis Mendes

VISION Mr. Mendes often creates double exposures. 

Arrivistes, as far as Louis Mendes is concerned. Where is the skill in setting a camera to “automatic” and pushing a button? Where is the permanence in a shot printed with no-name ink on no-name paper? Where is the craft?

In his hands. Mr. Mendes works the same crowds — and parades, graduations and concerts — cradling like a piece of sculpture a vintage Speed Graphic camera outfitted with two flash units and a Polaroid back.

That’s right, instant film, a phrase that sounds almost as dated as “electric typewriter.” In an age when digital photography offers instant gratification and cameras come in most phones, who would have thought a decent living could be had taking pictures with a vanishing technology?

Mr. Mendes does, and well enough to do it full time. He can sometimes charge as much as $20 for a portrait, depending on the location.

“I’m the only one with this camera,” he said one afternoon last week as the sun set and the wind whipped through the streets. “This is about a moment for nostalgia. People see these cameras in movies, but they’ve never seen one in person. But when they see this, they go: ‘Ooh. Ahh. Wow.’ ”

As if on cue, a young man who had just taken a picture of his friends with a tiny digital camera looked longingly at Mr. Mendes’s rig the way an econobox owner might swoon over a vintage Benz.

“I get that a lot,” Mr. Mendes said. “I really don’t even have to talk to get customers.”

He had started the afternoon outside Dean & Deluca on 49th Street: “Picture with the tree? Picture with the tree?” Maureen Behnke, visiting from New Jersey with her children, took him up on it. He posed them, shot the frame, pulled the film from the camera and tucked it under his arm. As they waited, he offered tips on what to do in the area.

“It was about a moment,” she said of her decision to be photographed. “I told my son he would never be this little again. In 20 years, he’ll be an adult.”

“And you’ll have a classic,” Mr. Mendes said as he handed her back the 2-by-3-inch photo in a holiday frame.

Suitably suave at 70, he has been doing this for almost 40 years now. He is nothing if not stylish, decked out in a red turtleneck, gray blazer and long black leather coat. As always, he sports a black hat whose left brim is clipped up with — what else? — a pin shaped like a Speed Graphic. A fan on his Facebook group called him “Shaft with a camera.”

If you have been at any parade or major event in New York — or the Super Bowl or the Essence Music Festival in New Orleans — you have seen Mr. Mendes. You might even have had him snap your portrait. Though at this time of year he does straightforward images with the tree in the background, he has also specialized in double exposures in which the subject appears twice, sometimes in different outfits or different seasons.

Yes, he knows Photoshop can let a novice achieve a similar effect. But that’s cheating.

“I can do it on the spot,” he said. “You don’t need a lot of stuff to make a shot. You don’t need lights and tripods. Just look at your subject, look at the light and shoot. You don’t need to take a thousand pictures to get a good picture. You need one good picture. One shot.”

As for those other guys selling pictures on the street, he pays them no mind. Competition, they are not. Some of them don’t even take a single shot; like barkers working for a photographer, they instead weave through the crowds holding out a sample 8-by-10 to lure customers. Frankly, some of them look like their only photo experience was at Central Booking.

“They’re not really photographers, more like picture hustlers,” he said of the shooters who hire the barkers. “They just push a button. They don’t know aperture priority from shutter priority. This, this is me priority. All manual. I set it.”

Mr. Mendes plans to work the Rockefeller tree until Jan. 7, when it is scheduled to be taken down and turned to mulch. Then he will return to the sidewalk outside BH Photo or Adorama Camera. Taking pictures of people who already own cameras makes perfect sense to him, the guy with instant film and a classic rig in a sea of digital snappers.

“Most photographers don’t have a good picture of themselves,” he explained. “They think nobody can take as good a picture as they can. So, I prove them wrong. There’s good money there.”

By Alexandra Savvides on 24 November 2009

The S640 boasts dSLR-like responsiveness and good pictures but is let down by its price and lack of competitive features like HD video.

Editor’s rating:7.8

• Good: Quick autofocus • Wide-angle lens • 5x optical zoom
• Bad: Quick to start-up but takes a few seconds to actually initialise • No HD video • Noisy above ISO 400
• Specs: Digital compact • 12.2 megapixels • 5 x • Secure Digital Card, Secure Digital High Capacity • See more specifications
• RRP: AU$499.00 • Where to buy? $255 to $480 at 6 stores

Photo gallery: Nikon Coolpix S640

Design

Featuring a flat front panel and a boxy countenance, the S640 doesn’t scream anything in particular when you take it out of the box. There are no dangerous curves, no odd protrusions or quirky exterior additions. It’s a lightweight, pocket-sized camera that houses a 5x optical zoom, with a wide-angle 28mm lens. It weighs 110g without a battery or memory card which is very light indeed, and it certainly feels dainty as it sits in your hand.

Around the back are standard controls, including a scroll wheel that also acts as a four-way directional pad for choosing shooting options, a playback button and a mode button to switch between shooting modes. By pressing the mode button a whole world of opportunities opens up — full automatic is the first one, followed by scene modes which cover the standard portrait/sports/flowers/food options, and then comes Smart Portrait. Blemishes be gone, with the skin softening effect provided in this mode. Next up comes subject tracking, and finally movie mode (though not HD, unfortunately).

The back of the S640 features the standard Nikon controls. (Credit: Nikon)

Inside is a 12.2-megapixel sensor and the highest sensitivity is ISO 6400. Given the poor track record of previous compact cameras which claim to be able to deliver images at this high level, we won’t be holding our breath in regards to the quality of the images at the aforementioned sensitivity. The 2.7-inch screen completes the noteworthy specifications.

The S640 uses SD or SDHC memory cards which slot in alongside the battery at the base of the camera. There’s also a tripod mount located underneath as well.

In terms of where the S640 sits in regards to its competitors, we decided to test it head-to-head with the Editors’ Choice-winning Canon IXUS 120 IS, a camera that retails for the same price (AU$499) and has a similar feature set, as well as being similarly sized.

You may be a beginner photographer with an entry-level camera but you can still take some great photographs. In fact, the cameras available these days are so good you would have a hard time taking a bad photograph.

The ease of photography and the availability of good cheap cameras allow everyone to become a photographer. You could take plenty of family photographs to share with friends and family. Family members who live far away would love to keep in contact using photographs. They say one picture is worth a thousand words.

One of the best things about digital beginner cameras is that they can take as many photographs as you like and not cost you anything. You download the pictures to your computer then edit and view them from your monitor.

There are plenty of photo editing programs available. You can create a digital photo album and send it to your friends and family. There are many different styles of digital photo albums. You are restricted only by your imagination.

Even if you do not have much of an imagination, you can still create an attractive digital photo album using one of the templates usually supplied with your photo editing software.

Digital Photograph albums can be copied onto a DVD and stored safely for future generations to view. In fact, it is a good idea to back up everything on your computer. You do not want to lose those precious memories. DVD’s are long lasting, hold plenty of photographs and do not take up a lot of space, unlike traditional photographs.

A Family Album on DVD is a great gift idea if you are looking for something personal to give a family member. Just think how thrilled Grandma would be to receive a digital album of her grandchild’s first year, and second, and third.

What is a camcorder?

On the face of it, it sounds like a stupid question, but it really isn’t. That’s because, today, there are many portable devices, from mobile phones and digital cameras to MP3 players, that will happily shoot digital video, but can’t be classed as a camcorder. While, for the most part, we won’t be directly addressing these types of video taking devices, many of the things mentioned in this feature and its future sections will be applicable to them.

(Credit: Sony)

The word camcorder is a fusion of camera and recorder and it applies to any compact, hand-held device whose primary purpose in life is to shoot video. At the time of writing (late 2009), all consumer grade camcorders store video in a digital format, even those that record to tape.
Camcorders versus other video devices

If you’re only ever going to shoot the occasional video, say your chance encounter with a celebrity, then a device such as a mobile phone or digital camera will be probably sufficient. These devices produce video that’s suitable for viewing on the device or posting to YouTube.

Should you be lumped with the task of filming a work function, or want to capture baby’s first steps/words/Spelling Bee challenge, or document the family trek through the wilds of Africa, then a dedicated device will produce far better results. For instance, the shape of a camcorder is better suited to being held aloft and pointed in one direction than a digital still camera or a mobile phone.

High versus standard definition

HD will give you a higher resolution, crisper image, especially desirable for editing and playback. (Credit: CBS Interactive)

Ignoring formats and shapes, there are two classes of camcorder: high definition and standard definition. Standard-def units start from around AU$500, while high-def models kick off from around AU$1000, but better, more fully featured models cost from around AU$1400 to north of AU$2000. So, clearly if your budget doesn’t stretch beyond a grand, standard definition is the only way to go.

If you do have a choice, we’d go with an HD camera every time. A standard-def camcorder will produce output that’s perfectly fine for old CRT or rear-projection televisions. On highdefinition flat s-creen TVs, however, they’ll look pretty dire — substantially worse than a standard-definition TV broadcast does, in fact.

Planning on editing your high-definition footage later in a video editing suite, like Adobe Premiere or Apple Final Cut Pro? It’s best to select a camcorder that records in the AVCHD format. Some camcorders, like select models in the JVC range, record in a proprietary format that isn’t widely supported by third-party editing tools.

Zoom

Buyer beware: optical vs. digital zoom
The difference is huge

Camcorder makers will generally quote two figures for zoom: one for optical zoom and one for the digital kind. As we explain in the following video, it’s best to ignore the latter figure.

It’s one of those great paradoxes, the cheaper and more basic a camcorder, the more likely it is to sport an ultra-long zoom lens. Although it sounds sexy holding a camera with 45x or 80x optical zoom, in reality it’s pretty useless. Most of us can’t hand hold a camera steadily at much past 3x or 4x zoom, so what chance have we got at 80x? At those magnifications, even the age old trick of affixing the camcorder to a tripod is rendered pointless at the merest breeze or tremor in the ground.

Image stabilisation

Hand holding a video camera is an arduous task and no matter how hard we try there will always be a small amount of shake. Image stabilisation (IS) is designed to counteract this. There are two forms of IS: optical and digital. Optical IS makes minor corrections with the lens and is by far the preferred option. More often than not manufacturers will advertise camcorders with digital image stabilisation as having just image stabilisation — it’s not until you dig into the specification sheets that you find out that it’s digital.

More?

Nikon Coolpix 4100

The NikonCoolpix 4100 is a great little beginner camera for all the family to use.It is a 4 megapixel camera with a 3x optical zoom lens.It has 14.5mb internal memory so you can shoot pictures even without an SD memory card inserted.

I do recommend you get a memory card because it gets frustrating to have to keep downloading your pictures to the computer. This applies especially if you let the children use the camera. They love to use the movie function.

Another quick hint that applies to all digital cameras- Get yourself rechargeable batteries. The lithium batteries last quite well but I found for the amount of use my camera gets, the rechargeable batteries are the best buy.