In the 1970s and 80s I was a pretty serious birder, and subscribed to Audubon magazine. I saved one issue from that time, from 1978, and happened to look at it the other day and noticed these camera advertisements.
The first thing that struck me was how text-heavy they were; these were from an era when people actually read rather than scrolled. The Minolta ad is two full pages of text with a few small photos. The Hasselblad ad is a full page of text with just one small photo of the camera.
The Rollei 35S ad feels more modern; it was on the inside front cover and the only ad in colour (apart from some Kodak film ads):
Nostalgia..Your post reminded me of my first event setup from 1976-1977, which I purchased from a very early rendition of B&H. The Kowa Super Sixty-Six was a poor man’s Hasselblad and the Ascorlight was an upgrade from my original “potato masher” Honeywell strobe. I managed with a single 85mm lens and two Ascorlights. Flash, film and events provided a pretty steep learning curve.
Nice to see these old ads. I remember liking the Olympus ads in my Dads National Geographic collection, especially the ones describing the engineering of the OM1.
I have always thought that the common marketing pitch that you needed different AE priority modes for different shooting situations was BS (like the Minolta ad above, but all manufacturers did this). Aperture priority is good enough for everything. Need a fast shutter speed to freeze action? open the aperture up.
Programme mode was designed to simplify things further at the expense of giving up all control, only to see the complexity added back a few years later via special programme modes for different shooting situations.
andrewd01 wrote:
I have always thought that the common marketing pitch that you needed different AE priority modes for different shooting situations was BS (like the Minolta ad above, but all manufacturers did this)
I think they were all trying to come up with innovations (whether actually useful or not) to distinguish themselves from their competitors. It's kind of like the challenge faced by cigarette manufacturers back them; they had to figure out some way to make their brand stand out from the pack, so to speak, and then ensure continuing brand loyalty...thus arose the Marlboro Man etc.
