Bloody Cameras (Part 2)

So, I got to a logical conclusion with my camera kit. I had discovered a rather unpalatable fact. Lugging about a camera bag with the weight of a couple of house bricks was no fun. I was actually taking fewer pictures in 2016 than at almost any point in the previous 20 years. I was actively finding excuses not to take my camera to events.

So. I got rid of it all.

Yep the D2X, the multiple lenses, the bag, filters, tripod. The lot. Before you jump to the wrong conclusion, I traded it all in and with the money bought a small digital camera (Panasonic LX100 with a Lumix lens, much lauded in reviews etc. etc) It worked really well too. Again, I got some good pictures with it. The Madrid ones are from it. But this time I faced two further issues.

The Pictures are good, but the camera is limiting. It can’t do properly wide angles and the optical telephoto isn’t that great before the digital zoom takes over with a big drop in quality. Also, I found it an unintuitive nightmare to use. It has approximately a zillion menu screens with a couple of words denoting an obscure option. When I wanted to use the accessory flash recently, I had to do a factory reset after half an hour because I couldn’t find the setting to enable the flash.

But the main issue the camera faces is nothing to do with its capabilities, its more about the competition. In the ten years since they were first released camera phones having gone from an hilarious irrelevance for people wanting to take ‘serious’ pictures, to hardware which produces pictures I can’t tell from stuff produced on the latest Leica. I currently own last year’s Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ and I really struggle to justify getting the portable out. When the phone takes pictures of the quality of the Portmeirion pictures here it’s tricky!

All that said I do find at the moment that I miss the process of actually raising a camera to my eye and taking a picture. I find it more intuitive to do things through a viewfinder. Also I have realised that I can use the phone to capture those Social event-type photos. It’s good enough, leaving a camera-sized hole when looking at the more considered photos. So…..

Yes, I’m going back into the market. I know I’ve said I’ll never revisit this topic, but I’ll let you know when the new kit is here. It’s not going to be costly – frankly spending £5 grand on kit is just not on the cards in the current climate. I’ve traded in the LX100, I can recover the VAT….. It won’t be cheap - but it’s time.

Bloody Cameras (Part 1)

Whenever two or more enthusiasts in any sphere get together you can bet that eventually they will start talking about the tools of their enthusiasm. Cyclists do it with bikes. Golfers do it with their clubs.

And Photographers do it with their bloody cameras. “What camera have you got?” is the appalling opening line in an inevitable pissing competition that I’ve got so tired of I try to never indulge in these days. To knock the topic on the head I’m going to devote a longer than normal Blog post in the hope that we never have to return to it again!

Let me start by saying I’m a massive gadget fan. I have digital music players throughout the house (Which rarely just play the damned music!) I have Nests, Hues and Alexas, Smart this and Digital that. I don’t actually know how many computers I own, but I’m guessing at 8-10 desktops, laptops, Tablets. I even had a business for a while, advising people with more money than sense how to make their homes “smarter”.

But for me cameras are a different category.

I started out back in the 70’s and 80’s, moving to SLRs in about 1982. I made a big jump in 1983 when I was given a bonus by a benevolent boss who insisted that the £1,000 was spent on something frivolous (Really!) I knew that the secret to great photography would be vouchsafed to me if I moved into Medium Format. Even in those days you couldn’t get a Hasselblad for that money, but I did get a Bronica with a nice lens. I had it for a week and put two rolls of film through it. The results were execrable. Chastened I went back to the photography shop and begged them to take it back and allow me to swap it for an early autofocus Nikon SLR with a telephoto lens for the same money. They agreed, bless them.

And so started a love affair with Nikon that endured. I moved up the rungs of the ladder until I reached the lofty heights of a D2X around 2008 (For those not in the know this was a honking great digital monster). I took some nice pictures with it. (The winter ones here are from it)

But……

In the same way that if you are rabbit the best golf clubs in the world won’t make a jot of difference to your score, £10k’s worth of Nikon (Or Leica or Canon) kit won’t make your pictures worth looking at on their own.

Also, I began to become aware that the sheer effort of lugging the kit around made it a slog to take out on the off chance that a picture would present itself. I found excuses not to pick it up. Additionally, on a practical level I got tired of being “the Photographer” at every event I went to. I realised that I spent parties looking for photo opps rather than enjoying myself.

I needed to do something radical!

(To be continued)

A good run ruined

This year has been a tad unusual to put it mildly. Holiday plans made pre-unpleasantness were scrapped and alternatives sought. One morning over coffee Susie said, “We can get into Portmeirion for a couple of days – what do you think?”

Which is how in late August we arrived in the Italianate haven on the North Wales coast. The weather was… well it was Wales so when I say good, you will understand that it p****d down on several occasions, but in-between we saw the sun. (If you haven’t been there, go. It’s grand.) One evening, to salve my conscience after over-indulgence, as men of a certain age are prone to do I sucked in my stomach and announced that I would be up early in the morning to go for a run.

Dawn was breaking when I was awoken by the slap of water on the windows. Phew. I looked hopefully at my phone. Blast. “Rain clearing”.

Which is how 15 minutes later I found myself jogging ridiculously slowly into the village as the clouds rolled overhead. It had stopped raining though. As there was little point in the exercise otherwise, I resolved to run around the headland on which the village sits. The path hugged the water’s edge, falling down to the sea and back up. Murder on the calves.

And as I ran, I became more and more aware of the scene unfolding across the water.

The tide was turning, and the water was glass-still. The wind had dropped, and sunshine was struggling to break through the cloud. As the path descended to the water’s edge the rays caught the wet rocks below.

On a whim I had stuck my Camera phone in my running jacket… just in case. I took a couple of shots from the path. Not bad…. but not quite there. I clambered off the path and gingerly made my way down the slippery rocks to the shoreline (“Stupid old runner breaks leg while ignoring signs to stay on clifftop path”) I sat down and braced the phone on my knee, then composed a wide-angle picture stopping it down to make the sky bluer and the clouds more prominent. Then at precisely the right moment the sun played along. I took several shots, bracketing and experimenting before moving back towards the village.

It was still very early and no one else had surfaced. In absolute silence I framed a picture of the village reflected in the sea.

Sometimes things all come together.

I jogged slightly faster, back towards my full Welsh breakfast. My run had taken longer than planned, but on my phone I had an excuse.