Well, I’ve finally got around to creating a blog again!
I used to have one when I ran my own photography business about 10 years ago.
Things have moved on a lot since then, especially on the social media side. I dabbled with Facebook for a year or two and realised I’m just not a social bunny and it was so difficult to filter out all of the rubbish stuff that I’m not interested in. So I deleted my account and removed everything that I put up there, which to be honest wasn’t much.
I did use Instagram for a while, especially in its early days when it was purely focused on photography and sharing good images. Facebook has managed to ruin that platform as well now so I moved away from that as well.
The last couple of years I’ve been following and reading photography blogs that are more geared towards the why and not the how or what. I’ll start sharing those sites once I get a bit more content created.
I want to put posts on here that are of a similar vein. I’ve been photographing things for about 40 years, some of it professionally, so know quite a lot about the how, although there is a ton load more to learn.
The what with interests me a lot less. I used to use Nikon professional equipment when I did this as a profession but sold all of those a long time ago. To be honest I fell out of love with photography for quite a long time. Most images taken in the interim were with iPhones of various guises.
Then about a year ago, sort of coinciding with the pandemic and lockdown I decided to get some used photo gear. As I had been out of touch on what was available now I found it totally bewildering.
To be honest I ended up with decision paralysis. There was just too much choice and way too much content on the latest and greatest gear. I certainly found that the quality level of digital cameras had come on leaps and bounds in the interim.
But so much information was about such things as dynamic range, ISO sensitivity, sensor size, etc.
I’d grown up on film and mostly slides so took all of this with a pinch of salt. Images taken in the 40’s,50s, and 60s was taken on what we would now think of as very limiting media but the power of those images hasn’t waned.
So I decided to buy a digital camera and lens that was at least 7 years old. Don’t ask me why 7, it just felt like a good number. Not too far away for the capabilities to be way out of day but far enough away to grab a bargain.
So after a fair bit of digging and research, I bought a Fujfilm XT-1 with a 35mm equivalent lens. I’ll start posting images from this camera at some point.
But about a week ago I bought a 12-year-old point and shoot Canon S95 and have absolutely loved using this tiny little camera. It’s about the size of a deck of cards and fits easily into a jeans front pocket.
All of the images on this post were taken with that camera, in jpg format with mild post processing in the iOS app Darkroom.
I have loved using my iPhone 12 Pro, I bought it mainly for its camera and I’ve captured some great images with it over the last couple of years. But it leaves me a bit dead in the interaction with it. Yes, you can download and use different camera apps. I’ve got about 10 and most probably used way more than that over the years.
But it still feels a bit sterile.
Not so this tiny wonder of a camera. I’ll create some content specifically about this but just to say the design is brilliant. You can easily switch between aperture priority, shutter priority or full manual (which I use quite a lot).
It just puts a smile on my face when I use it. As because it’s so tiny there is no reason not to have it with you all of the time.
It’s “only” 10mp, its dynamic range is a bit limiting and high ISO is a compromise. But it has a CCD sensor which I think is more film-like in its rendering and I just love the images it produces.
The handling is well thought out and it makes you feel much more of a craftsman when using it. You can’t really so much on the computational programming that’s crammed into smartphones. You have to think more about what you want to achieve and get back to basics on the skills in photography, balancing ISO, Aperture shutter speed, etc.
I’m really loving it! more to follow.
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