>Posted by Shawn Kearney on Sunday, July 20, 2003 - 1:24 am: > >Maybe it is because Americans are lazy and prefer auto focus cameras >(that never focus).
That seems to be the case. I was a guest at a San Diego camera club not long ago. It turns out they were almost all retired folks, only shot slides, and had never heard of anything other than 35mm, except for me, my friend, and one memory who taught photography at a local junior college.
They all made slide presentations, and most of them were not properly focused, but there was no comment about that point.
Then this Thursday evening I went to a meeting of the San Diego Underwater Photographic Society (a club I belonged to for 20 years, but haven't been involved with for about 15 years. They were voting on presentations for the U/W film festival to be held here this fall in connection with the 100th anniversary of Scripps Institute of Oceanography. All presentations had been digitized, converted to self-running power point or DAT presentations, and included music synced to the slide subject and/or transition. All had perfect exposure, good composition, and with only a couple of exceptions, were in perfect focus. The ones with focus problems dealt with the "only one chance" subject.
This club was also mostly retired folks who could easily travel anywhere in the world, but they did superb work.
Two clubs, same age group, same city, entirely different levels of photographic skill and care.