Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Not bad, only nine days since my last entry. Quite an improvement over the last interval! I’d been thinking of writing on quite a few occasions, but I guess I was just lazy. I finally decided that they make it easy enough for you to write even just very short entries, so why not go up whenever the urge comes and write a few sentences. No big deal, right? So here I am. I will try to stop writing now about writing the blog itself, since even for me this has become increasingly boring and annoying! But I just wanted to say that I will probably start writing about both things that I’m doing, some historical background, and stuff that might occur to me time to time. I guess your standard journal idea. Ok, so I lied, I’m still writing about writing! Aaah! I was talking to my friend Rich about this and he has a family member who writes a blog. As he put it, she has no “filter” and just writes about anything and everything. Well, I have lots of filters. Maybe you could call me one big filter! Maybe this will ntrude on this blog and make it less interesting than it might. Then again, it might actually prove beneficial, as I’m sure there is a lot I find important and interesting which to other people is just stuff they don’t want to know!
Ok, so lets see, I might as well start off by mentioning that I have a interest in photography. My dad was a professional photographer and I got my first SLR (a Nikon FE2) when I was maybe 15. I know, not that young. Before that I had the “instamatics” before then - disc cameras and, I think, 110mm cameras. These were after my dad died when I was nine but before I got the Nikon. I don’t remember if I had or used cameras before my dad died. I think what may have taken me a while to get more on board was a traumatic experience that happened when I was thirteen. I took one of those instamatic cameras with me on our big class trip to Washington DC, where I currently live, but which was the first big city outside of New York (where I grew up) that I had travelled to, and on top of that without my family! I took a large number of rolls, probably around ten. I gave them to my mom to have them developed and she put them in her bag and left them in her office overnight for some reason. Or perhaps she actually had them developed but left the prints in her bag in her office overnight. In any case, the next day her bag was gone along with any chance of recovering all the work I had done to capture those moments in DC now over twenty years ago. Pretty dissapointing. I think this was one reason we took a family trip to DC later in the year, although now that I think of it I don’t remember any pictures from that trip either.

The Nikon was a birthday or graduation present and I used it in a photography class and for my school newspaper, and personal shoots as well. I got into slides a lot, prints not as much. I ended up selling the camera after I got back from my semester abroad in Russia because I had some credit card bills to pay and no job as of yet (my last credits were satisfied on the trip so I didn’t have any more school to attend after I returned).

From the time I sold my Nikon, I pretty much gave up photography. I didn’t even own a camera for almost 9 years. My friend and former roommate Rich was of course a camera fiend. He had five or six different cameras, but I don’t think any were SLR’s. They were underwater cameras, or various kinds of compact (or not so compact) 35mm or APX cameras. Since I’m somewhat of a computer geek, I had begun thirsting for a digital camera back in the late 90’s when they were just getting to a point where they could produce a somewhat decent 4×6 print. But without the $500+ of expendible income to buy one of these, I consoled myself with the thought that they would invariably come down in price and get better, and I would buy a really nice one some day in the future. Then rich surprised me one day by getting one for me! It was a way too extravagent present from an extremely generous guy and I tried to refuse it as best I could. I think it was thanks for something but I’m blanking on what. Whatever it was, it didn’t deserve something like this, or anything for that matter.

So I found myself with a new Sony Cybershot DSC-S30 back in the Spring of 2000. It was a great little camera despite the lack of much manual control and I just loved being able to take shots willy nilly without having to worry about wasting film. I got some prints made, but because of the resolution the prints higher than 4×6 weren’t great. 5×7’s weren’t terrible, they just weren’t quite photographic quality even to an untrained eye.

Only six months later, I felt I was ready to step up to a more sophisticated camera and so I sold the Sony on eBay and after doing a bunch of research I bought an Olympus C-3000Z, which had full manual controls and 3-megapixel resolution - enough to print 8×10’s without any noticeable difference with prints from film. Of course I don’t think I ever actually printed anything from this camera, and certainly not any 8×10’s. By this point I had gotten very into online photo albums. I used Imagestation, which was a Sony site that I had become aware of when I got my first camera. I did a bunch of research and had decided to make this my site of choice because it gave you unlimited storage, had a very good interface, and was backed by a company which I thought was not going to go out of business the next month! Remember, this was back when the dot com bubble was just starting to pop. Anyway, the Olympus was ok, but it just was not as fun as the Sony. The Sony had a twistable LCD that was perfect for taking candid shots without people realizing you were photographing them. The Olympus didn’t. The Olympus also used a form a memory (”Smartmedia”) that I had some problems with - I lost a bunch of pictures one time when the card somehow got corrupted and I couldn’t even get it out of the camera! The pictures were decent, but I just didn’t take as many because it wasn’t as fun. Also the flash seemed weaker and so indoor shots were always pretty crappy. Finally, the batteries in the Olympus were plain AA, although you could use recyclables. The Sony, by comparison, had a rechargeable lithium ion battery that lasted much longer and would tell you exactly how much more time you had before it died. The solidity of the Sony, the brightness of its images, and even the design of the camera itself were simply more enticing.

So about ten months later, I finally stepped up to a new camera after selling the Olympus to a coworker. I did yet more research on the current crop of cameras out at the time and settled on the Canon G2. This was a 4-megapixel camera and I also got back the twistable LCD, lost the Smartmedia memory, and regained a similar battery type as the Sony. I began taking more pictures and for some reason (maybe my new girlfriend at the time being a professional photographer in her spare time) I started experimenting much more with manual modes and other advanced functions. The G2 was great and I had a lot of fun with it. However, in order to protect the lens and put filters on it, I ended up getting an extension tube that fit around the lens. Of course this made the camera more bulky because even when the lens itself collapsed back into the camera, the tube was still there, and it would have defeated the whole point if I were to unscrew the tube as well each time! Then I bought an external flash which added much more bulk. It turns out that most compact cameras have pretty weak built-in flashes. Besides, when the camera is so close to the lense, you get more red-eye and generally harsher, less natural lighting. Then of course there was the tube that was around my lense. Because the flash is right next to the lense, the tube would get in the way of the flash in a lot of shots and make this big dark area in the corner in many of my pictures where I used the built-in flash. So getting an external flash was necessary if I wanted to have decent indoor shots. Of course I had to get a bag so that I could hold the camera, the flash, and, hey, what the hell, everything else that came with the camera - power cords, usb cable, video cable, etc., and some other stuff I’d picked up - macro extensions, extra memory, duster, etc. So now I had this big bag I had to carry around with me when I wanted to use the camera. Ok, I guess I didn’t have to, but I felt a bit naked just carrying the camera alone without any of the accoutrements.
Here the story finally gets close to the present day. A few weeks ago, that girlfriend that I mentioned before, who is now my fiancee (her name is Jessica), decided to buy her first digital camera. Of course being a professional, she had to get a professional digital SLR, a really nice one, which takes all the lenses she’s amassed for her film camera. She got the Fuji S2. I had been wanting to get a more compact camera for a while mostly just to supplement the G2 and all the bulk I had put onto it. I knew there were limitations to these smaller cameras. My former boss and my sister and brother-in-law had gotten one of the Canon Digital Elphs a year or so ago and it had no manual functions and was only two megapixels. Well, when me and Jessica went to Europe last month to see a friend of hers who will be officiating at our wedding, we popped into a camera store over in Basel to develop some film and I was astounded by all the compact 4 and even 5-megapixel cameras they had on display. I guess I just hadn’t been keeping up to date with the current camera releases. This was a shocker to me, but I guess I should have expected it because it had been a year and a half since I had bought the G2 and of course technology moves quickly! A year and a half is actually a long time for such a technogeek (and early-ish adopter) like myself to go without some kind of upgrade! So when Jessica bought the S2, if I were to buy a compact digital, it would not make a whole lot of sense to have the G2 also. The G2, being more of a mid-size, it would be kind of pointless - I mean, if you want a camera you can take with you everywhere, use the compact and If you want fantastic looking stuff and portability isn’t as much of an issue, take the S2.

So doing yet more research, and with the added recommendation of a friend of ours who works at a local camera store chain, I decided on the Canon S50, which is compact, but has 5 megapixels and even more manual features than my G2! It doesn’t have a twistable LCD, and the lense isn’t as fast, but those are the only real deficiencies, and ones I could certainly live with when the trade off was such a huge improvement in flexibility. You can put external lenses or filters on it if you want, and you can even attach an external slave flash unit via a bracket. Of course all that makes it more bulky, so for now I’m just sticking with the camera itself so that I can enjoy the added portability for as long as I can! I was first going to sell the G2 to our friend Kelly who’s making Jessica’s wedding dress, but she decided that she didn’t need such a sophisticated (and thus pricier) camera. Luckily an old coworker decided to pick it up and I was able to use the funds (plus a little extra) to buy the S50.
So far, the S50 has been great. I am really hankering for a telephoto lense, seeing some of Jessica’s longer shots with her S2, and would love to get better debth of field, but otherwise, the ability to carry it around with me without thinking is great. I just participated in a national photo contest called “America 24/7” and took my camera everywhere and took tons of pictures. The contest is being organized by the same people who put out the “A Day in the Life” series but this time it’s specifically for digital photographers. Also all types of photographers are welcome - amateurs, professionals, and students. They will be publishing 53 books - one for each state, one for Washington DC, one for New York City, and one for the nation as a whole. If one of your photos gets published, you get a bunch of prizes, and of course, you get it published! The only downside is that for amateurs like myself, they are only accepting 7 images. Jessica signed up as a student and gets to submit 50. I don’t think I could have submitted 50, but I probably could have submitted 35 or 40. Pairing those down to 7 was really tough…

This is all to say that I’m providing links to my online photo albums in this entry, which I will also try to put in a list of links if I can figure out how to do that later. These links will be to a site called Pbase, which is a place that I started posting to back when I first got the G2. I started reading messages on this discussion forum on a digital photography site called dpreview.com, and all of the Canon folks seemed to be using Pbase as their online album repository of choice. It seemed to have some advanced features that some of the more commercial sites didn’t, although it didn’t provide printing services and could sometimes be very slow. Eventually they got smart and started charging, improved their servers, and now if you are new to the site you have to pay just to establish an account to begin with. Without a huge financer like a Sony, the guy who started it would have been broke in no time without doing something like this, or even relying on people’s good will to keep paying him voluntarily. All the pictures I post on there I resize to 640×480 and compress them to a fair degree as jpegs in order to make them smaller in storage size and faster-loading. Also if I had posted the original, who knows who would come up and take them and use them for whatever commercial or other purpose they wanted to without permission, credit, or compensation!

Here’s a link to my overall album
Here’s a link to my favorite shots
Here’s a link to the shots from the America 24/7 project