Image provided by: Texas A&M University
About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 9, 1981)
Around the CAMPUS With The Editors Of Modem Photography Magazine Muck On Your Lens? It Isn’t Always Easy To Remove L enses seem to attract dirt magically. Tromp across a dusty campus with your lens exposed and you’ll get a fine coating of dust. Fiddle with the camera and, inevitably, you’ll have a nice greasy thumbprint on the lens or finder. Use a dirty lens and you’ll get soft pictures and probably lens flare as light hits the muck and bounces around inside the lens and camera instead of traveling straight to the film. In years past, when no one was looking, many a lens was cleaned with the end of a tie or the comer of a handkerchief (some times not too clean). That spread the dust or grease around nicely. Luckily, few stu dents today wear ties or carry cloth hand kerchiefs. P Ivory for lenses? A touch in water makes ideal lens cleaner. Other ingredients for good camera housekeeping include Kleenex tissue, lens chamois and lens brush. Lens tissue is always being recom mended for cleaning lenses: who but the constant gadget-bag toter carries it? Even pros can’t find it in their camera bags when they need it. Small lens brushes available at photo stores are very handy for removing non-clinging dust from lenses, but you may have forgotten the brush too or probably can’t find it. (Hint on buying brushes: Don’t buy a paint brush thinking it’s cheaper than a lens brush. Some paint brushes are treated with oil to preserve them or to maintain their How do viewfinders get dirty? Greasy eyelashes! Clean with tissue. shape. You need a pristinely clean brush for a lens.) For removing surface dust, facial tissue works well. (We can vouch for Kleenex as a brand with less lint than many others.) Replacing dust with lint fibers is a step in the right direction but a dustless, lintless lens is even better. To remove dust, roll up a small piece of facial tissue and use it on the lens surface like a brush, in a circular motion. Don’t apply pressure on the lens surface with your finger behind the tissue. That will only serve to grind the dust into the glass surface. A grease spot such as a fingermark on a lens is not so easy to remove completely. Buy some lens cleaner and keep it around your room for whenever it’s needed or, if you’re around a chem lab, a touch a alco hol will do it when applied with the facial tissue or a wad of cotton. Don’t moisten too much. The lens surface should not become wet or moisture may seep under neath the lens ring and into the lens. Water with a touch of a liquid detergent soap is another way to go for lens clean ing. Remember to wash off the detergent afterwards with a damp tissue. One of our favorite materials for lens cleaning is chamois, the softened skin of a special sheep. You can usually get a small chamois at an optician. Use it like you would a facial tissue. Keep it clean in a plastic bag. Chamois and a tiny bit of alco hol or lens cleaning fluid makes a good grease-removing combination. What about eyeglass tissues? There has been a great deal of argument even among optical experts as to whether the silicon in eyeglass tissues damages coated lens sur faces. If you use it constantly, we think there may be some chance of lens damage, but we would have no compunction about using it gently very occasionally. Reminder: Lenses have two exposed ends—the front, which you will remem ber to clean, and the rear, which you won’t. Rear lens elements, especially if you have an interchangeable-lens camera, need almost as much attention as the front. Since they are within the camera, you can be lulled into thinking they are clean when they are not. Never put a lens on a camera without looking at the rear for dust or grease. Don’t neglect the camera’s viewfinder. They collect eyelash grease constantly (also fingerprints) and make clear, sharp viewing a near impossibility. Holding Steady And How????? W hether you’ve got a simple pock et 110 or a super camera, you’ll get blurred pictures unless you learn to hold the camera steady. Even a fast shutter speed won’t guarantee you sharp shots. Here’s how pros get them. (Beware of drawings or pictures in some camera instruction book purporting to show how to hold a camera. Many are wrong!) With a 110 pocket camera, grasp the ends between thumbs and first and second fingers. Hold to your eye. Place the most convenient finger over the shutter release. Press your thumbs upwards against the center of camera while pulling down slightly on the ends with your other fin gers—as if you were going to snap the camera in half. For verticals, it’s everyone for himself! Few pocket cameras are easy to hold for verticals so try various two-handed posi tions until you find a comfortable one. Suggestion: Use your forehead to brace the camera. Press the shutter release gent ly with a smooth, even pressure. With a 35mm camera, grasp camera and controls completely in your right hand, as if you weren’t going to use your left at all. Now bring your left hand, with palm open, under the left side of the cam era. Rest camera in your left palm and grasp the lens from underneath between your left hand’s first and second finger. Use these fingers to tum the lens mount for focusing. Hold the camera to your eye. Bring your elbows into your body and dig them in as much as you can for support. Use your left hand to support the camera and your right to aim the camera and work the controls. (If you have a non-focusing or auto- focusing 35mm camera, you needn’t grasp the lens mount. Just keep your hand underneath the camera.) Ready to shoot? Breathe gently. (No, you don’t have to stop breathing!) Keep your feet about 10 inches or so apart for good support. Don’t lock your knees. Press the shutter release so gently that someone standing next to you wouldn’t even be able to notice that you did it. OK, you made it. Practice will make perfect—but remember to stay cool, calm, and collected no matter what the excitement around you. And dig those elbows in! Ideal dirt remover, but who remembers to keep one handy? You should. Hold pocket camera firmly; braced against forehead for vertical shots (right) Herbert Keppler For SLR, support camera with left hand, use right hand for shooting. iasy Ways To Better Pictures ove in close: Many pictures are taken from too great a distance so that the main subject—and the point of the picture—is lost. Try taking pictures of people at distances from about six to eight feet for full figures, three feet or less for faces. And don’t for get to shift your camera to vertical from horizontal to make the most use of the length of your area. Move up or down: Don’t always shoot from eye-level. Maybe a low viewpoint would dramatize your subject and remove cluttered background. Before you snap, move around to find a more interesting approach. Avoid the noon-day sun: Direct sun light is, perhaps, the worst possible light ing, especially for pictures from different angles and distances. With human sub jects it’s hard to capture the best expres sion with one photo. Keep backgrounds simple: Unless you are looking for a specific effect, examine your backgrounds carefully to avoid trees and telephone poles growing out of heads. Squeeze the shutter gently: Regard less of the camera you use, s-q-u-e-e-z-e the shutter release gently. Don’t rock the camera. Above all, don’t jerk the camera as you press the release.