How did I get so old?

Some time back, when I was young I used to spend a lot of time hiking and camping. While I would hardly call myself an experienced bushman I at least knew how to get around without hurting myself (usually). As I got older and my life became more complicated I just ran out of time to do those things that I used to enjoy.

Lately I’ve taken up an old hobby, photography, and it has had an unexpected but pleasant side effect – I now occasionally get to spend a little time outdoors. Unfortunately I’ve recently experienced a rather rude shock. I’ve gotten old and become stupid along with it.

The story goes like this. My wonderful wife and I decide to go take some pictures at natural arch.  So I’m standing on a little wooden bridge taking this photograph… 

and I drop my lens cap. As is usual in these situations it falls sideways between two slats in the bridge.
No problem I think, I’ve hiked through the toughest territory this part of the country has to offer, so I step off the side of the bridge, take two steps and walk straight into this.

Now I know it doesn’t look like much, but believe me this is a bad, bad plant. This is Dendrocnide moroides, and it is one nasty piece of work. You can’t see it but all over the surface of this leaf are hundreds of tiny little silica hairs just waiting to break off in your skin. Each one is hollow and contains a little dose of neurotoxin. I won’t try to describe the sensation, I’ll just let you know there has been one confirmed death resulting from this plant and it has been widely reported that during the second world war, several Australian soldiers based in New Guinea committed suicide because of the pain from a severe sting.
I got very lucky. The contact was brief and light. I think I got only 6 or 8 hairs imbedded but this is what I looked like a few minutes after the sting.

The thing is, this was my first time. In all my years of walking through the Australian bush I’ve never been stung before. This time I take two steps off a path and walk right into it. The conclusion is inescapable, I’m getting dumber in my old age. I mean Jesus, is that fair? My body is going to pot and my brain now seems determined to go right along with it.

Photography course review

Okay, so the story goes like this – I posted this photograph in Flickr as part of my Project 365.

At the time I had just enrolled in their beginners camera course. Louise (a contact of mine) asked me to let her know what it was like, so having made her wait forever, here goes.

The beginners course costs $340.00 and runs two hours per week over eight weeks. I did the Saturday course that runs from 10.00 to 12.00 but they do evening courses also. The course is designed for SLR users, either film or digital. You could probably do the course with a point and shoot but you would miss out on much of the content. fortunately Louise has a lovely Nikon dSLR so this won’t be a problem.

Okay so, first and foremost, you have to know that it really is a beginners course. The first couple of weeks are spent discussing the very basic functions of a camera and I didn’t really get too much out of it. After that we started to get into working with exposure and then finally some work on composition. There were three projects during the eight weeks, each of which was designed to assist in inspiring the students to be creative in their photography.

The class size was nominally twelve. The classroom was small but air-conditioned and comfortable. The instructor was pleasant and knowledgeable.

All in all I enjoyed the course but it perhaps wasn’t as advanced as I had hoped. It would be an excellent course for someone transitioning from a point and shoot to a SLR But if you have had an SLR for some time, and you shoot using manual settings, it would probably be a better idea to start on one of the more advanced courses this institution offers.

Would I do it again? Yeah, I think so. At times it felt like I wasn’t getting anything out of it, but at the end I really believe it improved my photography - so that’s all that counts really. at this stage I’m not going to go on to any of the more advanced courses. Not because I don’t want to, but rather because the timetable doesn’t fit in with my work commitments. I am however going to the landscape workshop in a few weeks time and I’ll let you all know if there’s anything to report from that.

Photographic humour.

This made me laugh.

The megapixel lie.

While it’s become very obvious based on the site stats that I’m actually talking to myself here, I’m going to keep blathering on out of shear bloody-mindedness. I will not be silenced by the fact that no one is listening!

In my last post I passed on an anecdote about camera size being important. That’s true to a certain extent. A dSLR will always give you better image quality than a point and shoot, but there’s one problem with them. They’re big!

I am currently doing a project365 at Flickr. That’s where you post one photograph every day for a whole year. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. I’m two months in and I’m already struggling. What makes it extra hard is the size, cost and portability of my camera. It’s too big and too expensive to just sling in the car and take to work. What I really want is a second camera. Something small enough and cheap enough to stuff in a pocket and take with me into the field.

There’s only one problem. Camera manufacturers have become involved in a crazy megapixel war. Image quality is a difficult concept. It’s damn hard to write good advertising copy about how low the noise is in your camera when the typical P&S buyer doesn’t even know what noise is. So instead they stuff more and more pixels onto a tiny 1/1.8″ sensor and advertise that instead. But what the hell use is it to make a 10mp sensor if it’s so noisy it’s unusable over ISO100? Give me 5mp and a useable 800ISO, please!

Is there a decent cheap compact P&S out there, anywhere? Hello – is anyone listening?

Size does matter

The photograph below was taken at the Brisbane motor show. Wifey and I took an early mark and set off to see it all.  I spent a happy couple of hours snapping away but it was only later that my wife told me about the looks I was getting. You see I was using my Pentax K10D which is not a particularly discrete camera to start with. Add the battery grip and my 16-45mm lens and the outfit is, shall we say, largish. It feels good to me because I have big hands but it is a bit of a lump of a thing. Add the unmistakable and surprisingly loud mirror slap of an SLR and it’s not the sort of thing you can miss.

Now the looks, you see, were coming from young men. Usually in their twenties, they were all taking pictures with little point and shoot cameras. Now there’s nothing wrong with a point and shoot but compared to my outfit they looked a little, well, tiny. And that was the problem. Mine was bigger than theirs. And they were jealous.

Size matters, don’t let anybody tell you different.