I bet most of the video you shoot on a point and shoot camera are very short and they mostly finish with something like – “#$@#$ this is video!”.

So you probably question yourself – “Why Nikon newest SLR camera D90 needs a video feature?”

First thought would be – marketing. This is another cool feature that adds to 12.9 million pixels. But it feels there is something more to it. Flickr – photo sharing site allows adding videos in the same way as photos. It seems like visual arts – video and photo – unite and become very close. And do you imagine photographers sending decent videos to tv companies from major events like Olympics? This is a whole new market being born.

I enjoy taking videos with my Fujifilm s6500fd. Videos just tell more things sometimes. But just imagine having a high quality camera in your hands, where you can control depth of field and use different lenses. Video is just so much fun. You just need to spend a few hours stitching it together and putting some video and audio effects. And 60 seconds flickr limitation is way cool.

UPDATE: Digital photography school has a forum poll – Would you like video with your dSLR? as well as a nice blog entry – Video on a DSLR – Would You Use It?

So in the second post i am sharing with some of you, who is curious enough to read my fresh blog, some of the places i visit almost everyday.

I am enormously sad that Photoshelter Collection will not exist anymore. For those of you who do not know anything about Photoshelter i still recommend a newly opened blog that even has no name yet. The same person that was writing for Shoot the blog has started it and its already fool of interesting live photos. And if you want to know more details about Photoshelter i recommend Vincent Laforet blog.

My daily read – Photoshop Disasters. Check the archives, it must take 30 minutes of your life and you will start noticing Photoshop mistakes everywhere around you – in magazines and advertising. They are everywhere. My favorite so far is Fashion Week Daily: Dude, Your Grandmother Is Hot

If i had lots of free time i wouldn’t have more than 1000 unread messages from FFFFound. It is the best inspirational place around the web.

Don’t want to overload this post with too many links. So that will be all for today. These are blogs that i read daily and they are always full of interesting photos and stories behind them.

If you are reading some of them or have some nice daily-read links about photography i would very much like to hear from you.

My camera for the $50 camera project was FED 4. That actually cost me nothing because it was my mother’s father camera (but it costs 15,50 on ebay). It was given to him as a birthday present as engraved on the back of camera and it was laying on the shelf for ages. So it was my turn now to try it.

This is my first experience with film camera and I can’t describe how exited I am.

It is such a magical process. You get a brown film put it the camera where mechanics is so simple that you can actually see how it all works. And it is unbelievable! You simply let the light to flow on film and then later you give it to the lab (after 2 minutes of winding film back to the box because FED is not automatic), impatiently wait for it to be developed and who-a-la you get film where something can be actually seen. Some of the shots I seen I didn’t even remember taking! But it was one more day until I could see photos in a usual way – on my monitor because I went the lazy way and gave film to lab for a scan.

So as a project requires I will write a little description of FED camera. As many things were done in Soviet times, this camera is simply a copy of Leica. And FED is actually an abbreviation for name Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (it must be cool to have camera named in your name, mine would be DVS which doesn’t sound as cool as FED, so I guess its a bad luck for me, nobody will want to name camera DVS).

I seen on internet that people say it is a Russian camera, but it is so wrong. It is actually Ukrainian because it was produced in the city where I live – Kharkiv and it is Ukraine now. Though it would be correct to call FED a Soviet camera, because it was produced in Soviet times. And the factory still exists.

So I have FED 4 which is better that FED 3 because it has exposure meter. But I was unlucky and my light meter was out of order. So I was using a weird solution – my digital camera as exposure meter and sometimes my intuition for the shutter speed settings (which didn’t bring good results mostly, so I am thinking of getting exposure meter separately).

Karen Nakamura has noted some interesting quirks which I noticed also:

When releasing the shutter, the shutter timing knob rotates clockwise. It lands in a seemingly random position. When you wind the camera, it cocks the shutter, the knob rotates again and thankfully lands in the right place again.

Don’t adjust the shutter speed without winding the camera! When changing to a slower shutter speed, rotate counter-clockwise. This will energize the slow-shutter speed mechanisms (you’ll feel them when you move from 1/60 to 1/15 and slower). For B and 1/30 sec (which is the X-sync speed), rotate clockwise.

My conclusion is that it is a pretty good reliable camera. As some people say it should work under extreme condition in snow and heat. If you don’t mind to carry half a kilo with you, than this is a nice camera for you. I have actually taken it with me on two weeks holiday to Thailand and sometimes felt that my bag is too heavy to carry it everywhere around. One of the things that i need to mention in this little review is that tripod mount is wider than standard and it didn’t fit my usual tripod.  Also i heard that you need to be very careful with pointing it to the sun as it may burn a hole through shutter curtain.

I forgot to say anything about film that i have used. I am new to film photography so i have made a big mistake when i took my camera to Thailand, i didn’t bring any film with me. So i had to use what was there around (Kodak 200 iso) and this is why my photos are so noisy. Here are some photos made with FED on Fujifilm iso 200, the colors there seem to be brighter and photos are overall less grainy.

And finally here is my whole film that i am a bit afraid to show to everyone because it is full of mistakes and more than 10 photos from airplane window. Hey, it’s fully mechanical so i had no guilty making photos with it during landing. And with digital as they say you can’t, though everyone does… Well anyway i posted there all my film as it is, even no “digital room” tweaking so that you can see yourself what it is to see film for the first time from the lab.

So what is next? I got totally hooked on film now and my next experiment will be 6×6 film camera Reflecta. And i must warn you that film is dangerous, once you try it, it is difficult to come back to digital.