Today’s Post by Joe Farace
#corsetmonday, like the rest of us, in on holiday today.
For readers outside the USA, Washington’s Birthday is a holiday that was celebrated on the third Monday in February in honor of George Washington, the first President of the United States, who was born on February 22, 1732.
And it was that date was celebrated for many years until the creation of Presidents Day* that seems to have been invented by corporate lobbyists to make sure that people only get one holiday in February instead of two, the other being Lincoln’s Birthday which was formerly a holiday that was celebrated on February 12, when I was a kid.
Presidents Day is also an excuse to remember all of the American presidents, not just George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. The day is a holiday in most states and some celebrate Washington’s birthday and the third president Thomas Jefferson but not Lincoln’s. What brings to mind what kind of mirrorless cameras would these presidents use if they we’re alive today.
Washington was known for his wisdom, judgment, courage on the battlefield, dignity and of course his honesty. There’s that whole cherry tree thing… He would, of course, be shooting with an OM Systems aka Olympus camera. All you have to do is look at all the recent Oly cameras, especially the new OM-1. Heck they even named it after a real camera and it sorta kinda looks like a film camera. The original 35mm film OM-1 had a 24 x 36mmmm film format that’s not even close to the standard Micro Four-thirds 18×13.5mm format although the OM-1 sensor measures 17.4 x 13mm.
Lincoln, he was a hat guy and was know as The Great Emancipator although history has shown he was dragged kicking and screaming to that position. Instead I prefer to think of him as The Great Pragmatist. I think he would shoot a Fujifilm XH-2—and since they keep discontinuing many of their now legendary film emulsions, isn’t it time they dropped the whole “film” thing from their name? The XH-2 looks like a real camera and uses an APS-C format chip that sits comfortably in the middle between full frame and Micro Four-thirds. And it hits 40-megapixels.
I’ll confess that Jefferson is a personal hero of mine because he was a true Renaissance man who investigated new ways of thinking. That’s why he would love a Lumix, especially the S5 Mark II. It’s as compact as Panasonic’s Micro Four-thirds professional cameras but has a full frame (but only 24.2-megapixel) sensor. Because every new model of Panasonic’s cameras seems to go off in a different direction. Like Jefferson, they’re always looking for new ways to do things even if they drive us all crazy doing it.
Special Note: In the list of cameras above, I have no axe to grind as you can tell by the list of cameras that I own (both Olympus and Panasonic) as well as Canon DSLRs. I’ll always hold true to the old sixties axiom—different strokes for different folks—and think people should shoot whether they like and can afford.
*President Richard Nixon did not, as a widely circulated Internet story claims, issue a proclamation changing the holiday’s name from Washington’s Birthday to Presidents’ Day. His Executive Order 115 on February 10, 1971, just announced the new federal holiday calendar, as passed by Congress in 1968.