Vivitar V3800N 35mm SLR Camera

A look through the current B&H photographic company's catalog contained an old artifact that this old newspaper reporter/photographer had seen a lot of at one time. It was a manually operated 35mm single lens reflex camera that used film, just the type that had been in use by practically all of the newspapers in the United States during the time I had been a reporter. More specifically, it was a Vivitar V3800N, advertised in the B&H catalog as coming with a 28 to 70 millimeter zoom lens in kit form.

I had been looking for that type of camera because things have gotten to the point that local camera stores no longer stock SLR film cameras. You can find plenty of those little pocket digital cameras that look like something Rube Goldberg cooked up, but don't resemble a real camera, at least to somebody who started taking pictures with a 35mm SLR. You can find plenty of digital SLR cameras today in local camera shops, which look like the old film SLR's but are actually something quite different.

Don't get me wrong. Those little pocket type digitals do get the job done, and are much quicker to get prints or images from than the old film cameras were and still are (if you can still find a film SLR). All you have to do with one of the pocket cameras is set it on automatic, which in effect makes it a digital point and shoot camera, go through the drill of framing the shot, pressing the shutter and then taking the camera back to your PC at home to load the images onto the computer. Nothing could be easier or quicker. At times, I have been hard pressed to see the difference between an eight-mega pixel digital print and a 35mm film camera print.

Chances are you can get just as good of images and prints out of a digital SLR, especially the ones with more than an eight mega pixel capability. However, the initial cost of those cameras is high, and the added personal expense of that proposition is that you have to relearn how to use an SLR camera, even to the point of the terminology being used in the camera's manual. I always thought the term RAW, for instance, referred to one possible condition that shrimp could exist in rather than something that referred to how a camera operated, for instance.

You get the message. I am one of those old dinosaurs who spent most of his photographic incarnation using those film SLR's. In the current day and age, it takes much less time from when you actually click the shutter (or what passes for it) to the time you send the image out to a customer on a computer via the Internet. This is due to just having to upload the images onto the computer and then telling the computer to send it to a specific email address. With a film camera, you have the added step of having to get the film developed, then having either a print or digitized images made depending on how you plan to get the images to the final customer, like a newspaper or magazine.

Back when I started using a camera in newspaper work, all we had to use were the old manual film SLR's. The working newsman who normally had to use the camera in a big hurry, at such occurrences as fires, gunfights, traffic accidents and the like. This meant that you could not re-stage each and every shot if you thought you got the focus slightly off, or the exposure was not quite kosher.

Nope, you normally had to come screeching up on the scene, grab the camera as you scooted out of the car, then start automatically sizing up the lighting, lay of the land and other variables as your feet hit the ground. Was it bright sunlight or was there cloud cover, which directly affected the available light and the camera settings? Was it one of those things that meant you had to hide behind your car as you popped your head and the camera up over the hood to get a quick shot or two due to possible gunfire erupting in the immediate vicinity? Maybe it was a traffic accident or a standard fire that did not have any threat of bodily harm as far as the photographer was concerned, as long as you stayed out of the way of traffic or of possible debris falling off a burning building.

At any rate, the world of news photography as I knew it consisted of using a 35mm SLR and knowing how to use it well enough to be able to set it up correctly without even thinking about it, well before the advent of things like autofocus. Like driving a car with a manual transmission, you had to know how to use the camera under varying conditions without having to spend any time thinking about it. You just did not get a second chance at getting a decent shot in news photography, so you just had to know what you were doing. When the perfect shot presented itself, you had to be ready for it and already have your camera set up for the conditions that prevailed.

One other thing that helped was that the papers I worked at had long since standardized on 400-speed black and white film, normally Tri-X, which meant you didn't have to fiddle around with changing the film dial setting, which further meant you had one less thing to slow you down or foul your operation up.

Now that digital cameras have come into common use by newspapers, you have auto-focus and a host of other advantages built into the cameras that you did not have with the old SLR's, but there is a downside to that.

Those new digital jobs rely heavily on the use of microchips to make the autofocus and other features operate. They also depend heavily on batteries to keep enough power coming to make all those features keep on working. I've managed to get to the point where I have used film and digital cameras that relied heavily on both microchips and batteries to keep them going, and have had them fail at just the precise times that I could ill afford them going out of service. Just when the right shot presented itself, or when a couple extra shots would have rounded out a series of shots that would have made a good photographic presentation or feature, the microchips or the batteries have gone out. When that happens, you are entirely up the creek without a paddle, batteries or microchips. All your effort, or at least a great part of it until the time the works was fouled up, has been wasted.

Not so with the old mechanical cameras, like the Pentax K- 1000 with which I really learned to take photos. All you had in the way of batteries with the Pentax K-1000 was a couple small wafer-like batteries that powered the through-the-lens light meter. If those batteries went dead, all that dropped out of operation was that light meter. With enough experience you could guesstimate the lighting conditions and camera settings so you could still get a decent photograph to run in the next edition. If you didn't have enough experience to guesstimate the settings against the available light, the little box the film came in had some printed settings-to-available-light tips on it.

The old Pentax K-1000's could hold up to a hellish amount of abuse. I have bounced them off the walls of a C-130 transport aircraft transport, used them in the middle of rainstorms, and dragged them through the dust of the roads in Honduras that was several inches thick, and they have never quit working.

When I finally got a film SLR of my own, it was a Minolta X-700 that was digitized to the extent you could use it manually or semi-automatically. However, since I needed a second camera or felt I did, I wound up getting a Vivitar manual SLR that was no doubt the immediate predecessor to the V3800N I just bought from that photography outfit in New York City. The price on that first Vivitar I ever bought was $100 for the body and since it had a K-mount the same as the Pentax K-1000's did, you could get plenty of different used lenses at local pawnshops for not much money at all.

Like the Pentax K-1000, that first Vivitar film camera was manual in operation. One drawback to it was that it seemed to be a bit more cheaply made. It had what seemed to be largely a plastic body to it, though it was a bit more ergonomically friendly than the K-1000's. That first Vivitar did not hold up as well as the Pentax and sometimes the only thing that worked for a money-strapped newsman was jury-rigging repairs on your own.

The nice thing about that first Vivitar I had was that it still managed to come up with decent photographs, with the proviso that the photographer held up his end of the canoe and you used decent film in the camera. The price was also right at the time, circa 1985 if my memory holds up.

Just off the top of my head, I can still recall several front page photos that accompanied stories I wrote that I took with that original Vivitar. One was a shot of a family residence in the boonies of Wetzel County, West Virginia, where several members of one family had been murdered during a robbery. The shot was taken during a jury view of the crime scene, which was visited by jurors on a hot summer's day as they were hearing evidence during a retrial of one of the defendants in the case. I had parked my car about a quarter mile from the residence due to poor road conditions and walked in, and got the shot from about an eighth of a mile from the house with a 50mm lens on the camera, and from an elevated vantage point on the road leading to the house. It was one of those hurried shots that every news photographer has to take, but it was certainly good enough to run on the front pages of the morning and evening newspapers in Wheeling, West Virginia.