Much thinking about cameras.
I categorically refuse to jump on the "funeral" or "15 things" band wagons. You cannot make me think of mortality, 30 days before my 30th birthday. So, Nyeah, to all of you.

Thus I have written, thus it shall be done.

I think I'm going to use my final LJ code to start a photo-journal. It doesn't give me hosting space, (not that hosting space is a problem for me, being part-owner of BS's hardware) but it does give me a forum for putting pictures up, and I like that idea. I've been playing with photography for more than 20 years now (wow, tha's a loooong time, but it's true. I got my first camera when I was 9. More on that later.)

So, Photo-Journal. I'm not sure what I'll call it yet, which is really why I've not actually started it yet, although I do have a folder of pics ready to put up in one big swoop when I do.

But, it's got me thinking.

I love photograhy. Not just the canon thereof, the arty, well thought out, "intelligent" pictures, but candids, and basic "lets remember this in 5 years" pictures. I love the idea.

Digital photography has been a huge boon to me. Everyone (even me) jokes about how often I upgrade my digital camera, but I'm a junkie for quality, and that means improved lenses, better CCD's and increased MegaPixel numbers, there's no way around that. I really, really like my Minolta, but had the Canon S400 been available when I was buying my Minolta, I would have picked the Canon up, no doubt. Speaking of, burntflowers, did you ever get yours? I know you were talking about it.

So, the Canon S400 is my current pick, once I sell my Minolta F100. However, I don't think I'd be looking at (or have looked at) either of them very seriously, had my Fuji 4700zoom not gotten broken last fall. I adored that camera, it was amazing, the picture quality was unbelievably good, it had great features, and was _fast_. I adored that camera. It was a little chunky, but it fit well in a pocket.



My camera's have spanned the whole photographic spectrum. I spin off spec on digital camera's like there's no tommorrow, but I still remember every single camera I've owned.

First, was my Olympus Trip 35mm. This was the camera I got when I was 9 years old. I got it for my birthday, as a hand-me-down from my dad, it had been his camera in college. I think it was a 1967 edition camera. I still own it. It had, in fact, it HAS one of the single best, fixed lenses I have ever had the privelege of using. And I took that camera EVERYWHERE. Those were the days when mom and dad paid my developing/film costs, to encourage my creativity, and I thank them for my current addiction to cameras.

I used that camera for years. In fact, until I got my Pentax PZ-10. Oh, yeah, I went through that phase in the 80's that everyone did, with the Kodak Disc Camera's. God, those things were SHIT.

But, when the disc-camera thing wore off (and it did, quickly) I went back to my Olympus Trip. And took competent pictures, for a 12 year old, working with a 30 year old camera.

I got the Pentax PZ-10 in 1992, for my birthday/christmas, and in anticipation of graduation. I've taken what I consider some of my best pictures with this camera; Me and Jay used to wander around in his truck, with some tripods, looking for photo ops. Once I get a scanner, I'll get some of those pics out of my albums, and onto the net. There's a story (or rather, there are stories attached to those outings, as you can imagine).

So, yeah.

Then, in 1999, I started reading about digital photography. I thought right away, just as the purists still do, that there's NO WAY a digital camera can approach the quality of a good 35mm camera, for the same price.

And, there wasn't. I got a used, Agfa E-photo digital camera, for $200 of some kid in the market. (he lived down there, it wasn't a street corner purchase). It had two megs of onboard memory, was expandable, permanently with either a two meg or 4 meg expansion chip, which could not be removed once installed. It had no zoom of any kind, digital or optical, and it required 4 AA batteries. It was big. It had no viewscreen, and it took either 320x240 or 640x480 pictures.

And it was great!!!!

New vistas opened. Oh, the quality WASN'T up to 35mm, but damn. No processing costs!! Instantish gratification! I could snap as much as I wanted (and did, as you can see from my webpage dating back to those days).

And I was hooked.

A year later, I bought the HP318i. It was ok, but a month after I bought it new, the opportunity to buy a Casio 2000ux This had EVERYTHING I wanted at the time. Optical zoom, Micro-Drive support, USB support (first time ever for me). So, I sold my 318i to burntflowers for 100$ less than I paid for it, new, and spent that money on the used Casio. That one lasted me a year. It was GREAT. I got it just in time, too. I was out of work that summer, after hurting my back, and couldn't afford an upgrade for a while. It took great pictures, though, great colour, good clarity, little distortion, which was unusual for early digital camera's, and it lasted, and lasted.

June of 2002, I saw an ad for the Fuji Finepix 4700, and read the steves-digicams review. I fell in love with it right away. It was selling new for close to 1100 bucks, and was well worth it, from what I had seen. However, it was being offered for 500$ used from Mark Bell, who was the editor of Monitor magazine at the time. (probably still is, too). He'd recieved it gratis from Fuji to review, and had just recieved the latest edition, so was getting rid of it to make room for the new crop. I didn't dicker at all. It was worth the 500$, and more. It was PRETTY too, rather than just functional. In fact, it's still one of the prettiest camera's I've ever seen. That appears to be a hallmark of that generation of Fuji digitals; the F601 and Finepix 6800 were similarly designed. I almost bought the F601 instead of the Minolta, in fact, when it became necessary for me to upgrade again 6 months later.

Why, if I'd just found the camera of my dreams, (and I had) did I upgrade 6 months later?

Well, Basically, through a miscommunication about who was actually holding the camera one night, in a bar, with co-workers, it swung in a hard, heavy arc on the wrist-strap (attached to my wrist), and slammed the lens off a sugar-shaker on the table. The lens tube snapped off, inside the camera, damaging the CCD, and the repair cost on the camera was $565. It was not to be. The girl in question (a young lady named Jaimie-lynn, who is not, and never has been ardently was very upset, and I simply told her in the days following that the repair was 100$ and not to worry about it, as she would have insisted on giving me money for a new camera, despite not being able to afford it.

So. The 4700zoom was history.

And I bought the Minolta F100. Which is a GREAT camera, I've enjoyed it a lot. But, I've fallen in love with the way Canon make camera's, and I've decided that I must have this one. This one, the S400, will last me for at least a year, probably more like three, simply because it is THAT DAMN GOOD. Oh, it's true. It has every feature that I really, really want, and does it the way I want it to.



So, upgrade.

But, As I said when I started this diatribe, I REMEMBER all my camera's. I can tell you which pictures in which album are taken with which camera, or, in the case of digital, which pictures are taken with which camera.

I'm attached to each and every one of the camera's I've owned, digital and 35mm, SLR and Point-n-shoot.

Not only because of WHEN I owned them, what the documented in my life, but they were a part of my life during that period.

I love camera's. I never got into video-camera's in the same way; they weren't.... emotional enough. There was no way to interpret what was on the film in another way; you had sound, there were conversations, the image moved, you saw where people came from, and where they went; it was the whole thing, rather than a clip, an excerpt, frozen in time. Photography still leaves a lot to the imagination, which the video-camera documentation craze doesn't. Oh, I always appreciated the ideal of a "Flash-me-Cam" at parties, *sigh* but beyond that, I didn't have much use for video; it bored me in a way that photography has never done.

Even the crappy point-n-click-at-parties photography I spend so much time doing.

The signal to noise ratio in my photography is high, I must admit, but that's also a part reason for the photo-journal. I don't know if I have any real talent for photography, but, I know I love doing it, and that's enough, at the end of the day. It touches something in me (however cheesy that may sound) that really works; in a way even writing never did.

I don't think I had a point when I started this, and I don't think I made one. Yay for consistency!

cut added 14:50, 2003-09-23