Less than a week ago I brought myself a new camera. The rational was that I wanted something that I could keep in my pocket and would have low ethnographic impact. The new Panasonic GF1 with 20mm lens does the trick.
The camera has some of the advantages of an SLR, quick shutter (no lag), quick auto focus and interchangeable lenses, but is relatively small. Its not that great in low light and the digital viewfinder is a bit small (but functional).
Unemployed and Shopping
This is a sample photo, taken a night. I could have spent hours trying to get the composition right, its a plaque to unemployed protestors in front of billboards, the one on the left for a shopping mall, the one on the right, out of frame, for Moet champaign.
The most annoying thing so far is that the RAW format is not supported by Apple Aperture (my photo catalogue and editor of choice). The upside this that it forced me to play with Adobe Lightroom (free beta test of version three), which has some editing features that Aperture misses.
Manchester City Centre
This photo was converted to black and white, given a blue tint, a graduated filter and some vignetting.
2 Comments
Hi Darryn. The pictures of the new camera look fine. The first tested its ISO and the second does have a lot of sharp details. I do agree with you that something portable but still decently resembling a DSLR is perfect in many occasions.
Recently I’ve been much more attracted to cameras and photography. My father is a news reporter and editor (you probably knew that) and he is a fan of SLRs. In fact he has passed his old Olympus E510 (with two nice lences, 11-22 and 18-180) to me, and I added the third one, 50 2.0 (it works very well with portraits and macro pics). The Chinese fans call beauty portraits with a big aperture and blurred background the “sugar water pics”. Taking into consideration the 10,000 girls on campus, I guess it’s not too bad a choice.
My father’s budget for a new DSLR is expanding, because he is now interested in Canon 5D mark ii. Of course, it goes well with his new Nissan Qashqai for the Tibet trip next year. Hopefully I could also occasionally borrow both sometimes, lol.
It’s the crazy semester end, I guess. Same here. So take care, and best regards.
As I’ve discovered the hard way, borrowing would make much more financial sense than buying!
While I like portraits, I have been doing some thinking about how we can extend the idea to paint portraits of some of our students and alumi (where by portrait I mean a longer story about who they are, what they did and didn’t get from study and what they are doing now and hoping to do now). It might be a useful way to focus and reinforce some of the things we try to do with current students — who might believe the real stories of recent graduates much more than they believe us. Of course, this is even more time consuming than taking a good photograph.