For many many years taking photographs was always just a perfunctory 35mm point and click. I’ve no idea where many of those photos from my very early years are. In a box in the loft no doubt.
In my mid twenties I bought a second hand Olympus IS-1. A pukka 35mm SLR with an integral zoom lens. It was quite the thing in it’s day and I still miss the form factor and pistol-grip. All of the great photographic trips of my life (all over Europe, the US, Southern Africa, The far east and Japan) were shot on that Olympus. I have hundreds of great photos and get a gooey feeling at the prospect of unearthing the best of them when a get a-round-tu-it.
Going digital for the first time in Late 2000 I splashed out on an eye-watering €800 Fuji Finepix 4700. Almost €100 for a 32Mb memory card on top of that if you please! A point-and-click camera but it had a reasonably high resolution that was fine for web shots. Probably half of the shots on this website were taken with it so for that I’m particularly thankful – a real practical application and it earned its keep. Longevity wasn’t it’s strong point and the clever pointy-out lens bit and shutter mechanism gave up the ghost after four and a bit years. A sad day.
2005 and D-SLR’s were still unreasonably expensive… €1500 before you got anywhere, so thoughts of one of these went on hold for a while. I got a hands on with one in the summer of ’05 and took some interesting photos in the garden here – so the seed was sown.
Step into the frame an almost throwaway Canon A430 point and click digital. A massive leap in image quality over the Fuji and I was thrilled at the results with this thing and it was more than capable of bridging the gap. It still gets toted around everywhere as it comfortably slips into your jeans pocket – highly portable and bullet proof build quality. A good gizmo.
2007. The price of SLR’s comes down to consumer levels and I take the leap with a Canon EOS400D. What a massive learning curve. Reviewing my results over the 5000+ images I’ve taken shows that things are improving – slowly but surely. It is rewarding though to take a good photo and every once in a while something which I’d be happy to share comes along. They’re rare (0.6% of my snaps!) but that’s the beauty of digital. What you don’t want to keep, costs very little.
So, a handful of the better ones – almost all of which were taken here in Bellebouche or the locale are in this flickr slideshow set.
Of course. The bug is biting a bit now. I’ve bought a couple of cheap bolt-on lenses. A Fixed focal length 50mm prime and an ebay cheapie 90-300mm zoom lens. I hope you see an improvment in the quality of the photos on the blog in future!
