Me and My Cameras

Friday My Town Shoot Out

My present camera companion: Casio Exilim EX-H30 (bought in May, 2011), here with a flexible “GorillaPod” attached.

For the portrait above I had to use my other digital one, a Nikon Coolpix 4600, bought in spring 2006:

The Coolpix has two advantages which may still sometimes make it useful:
1. It runs on common AA batteries.
2. It has an optical viewfinder.

However, the Exilim has a very good battery and can take LOTS of pictures before need of recharging. It has no optical viewfinder but it has a much better zoom. So I very rarely use the Coolpix now (except for tricky challenges like how to show you the back of the other one!).

I got my first camera when I was nine (back in 1964). It was an old one I ‘inherited’ from my dad, who also processed our black-and-white films himself back then.

My little brother with two playmates in 1965. Photo taken by me (at 10 years old) with my first camera; reproduced here with help of my present camera and a bit of digital editing, because the original is glued into an album with spiral spine which won’t lie flat on the scanner!

I don’t remember the name of that first camera or what happened to it. I never got very good at handling the manual settings. Through my teens and into my twenties, I had two or perhaps even three instamatics. At least one of them was a Kodak pocket one using the 110 format.

In 1983 before a journey to Germany I bought an Olympus XA2 with 3-zone autofocus, which allowed me to also take diapositives. That camera came to serve me well enough for 23 whole years until I bought my first digital one.

▲ Image of an XA2 from the Internet

A winter picture taken with the XA2 in 1984. Back then I was living in Karlstad north of Lake Vänern, and they were still floating timber down the river Klarälven.

 

Nowadays I live close to another river, Viskan.
Photo from December 2012.

Today (1 February 2013)

Watery Wednesday–Raindrops Keep Falling…

It is a Watery Wednesday indeed. Not sure my camera is waterproof enough for it, so I picked a picture from my archives… Lupin leaves. And just in case you’ve forgotten what the flowers look like, here is a collage to cheer you up and remind you of ‘the greens of summer’:

♫ Now where did that phrase come from… Oh yes:

Kodachrome
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away

Paul Simon

Shadow Shot Sunday

For Shadow Shot Sunday

In this picture I used the focal point tool in Picasa 3
to keep the blue seat on the white chair
but turn the floor black-and-white.

I Wish!!!

This is - and at the same time is not - my balcony.
The picture was taken using the panorama view on my camera.
In reality, I’m afraid the balcony has a much less interesting shape.
It is quite straight, four corners, no curves. And it is not huge.

What fascinates me with the panoramas is that they come out “the opposite” of the movement you do with the camera. That’s probably quite logical for someone with a technical mind, but I still can’t quite get my head around it! ;)

 

▲ Normal view, looking from one end to the other ▼

 

“He Gave Us Eyes To See Them…”

Ginny (Let Your Light Shine) commented on my Watery Wednesday post yesterday (a green glass bottle stuck in the ice in the river) that it seems (I assume she must mean from other posts…) we don’t have much problem with litter here…

My answer was that “With the camera, one focuses on the bits that one wants to see. And editing gives even further possibility to cut out the bits one does not want to show.”

I have to confess that my camera is not really set by default on “the truth and nothing but the truth”. I think it’s more set on finding

“All things bright and beautiful … All things wise and wonderful…”
(follow the link for the full lyrics)

So unless litter happens to be sort of beautiful (like a green glass bottle magically frozen in a waterfall) - or at least extraordinary enough to cause wonder - my camera does not seek it out. That of course does not mean the litter is not there In Real Life. You just don’t get to see it, unless I choose for some special, odd reason to show it. Like today, because Ginny sort of requested it…

Scrolling through my February pictures, I realized that I did have a few more recent photos of litter. Things that did seem extraordinary enough to pass through my general “ugliness filter”…

 

Yes, things can be found in the river which don’t belong there.

 

Yes, empty bottles get dumped also in other places than the river. This one caught my attention, because on that day I was out “exploring”, hoping to find signs of spring… Hmm…

I bent down – ouch – and took the photo, continued my walk… Stopped. Turned back.  Picked up the (empty) bottle and carried it to a glass recycling container. (Had just struck me that I’d be passing by one anyway.) Still felt kind of awkward just walking that short distance holding it. (Never did a lot of exploring of alcohol. Prefer tea!)

 

On closer look I could understand why the person who dropped half an orange might not have been too keen to pick it up… Yuck.