Setting out...

about this blog and my new camera

This will be a photojournal of visual and personal exploration following the guidance of an online photography teacher/muse.  There’s a button link to Find Your Eye in the sidebar.

The photo of poppies I used for my profile image here wasn’t done for the course – it’s one I took several years ago – nor do I think it’s a “great” photo, but I chose it for two reasons:

1.  It makes me smile.  It’s a warm cheerful welcome for me when I come here to post and for anyone else who comes by to visit.

2.  It represents a personal lesson I want to keep in mind.  If I had consciously set out to show off the intense color of those flowers, my first thought would have been to photograph them against a white or black background, or at least something of very light or dark value, so they’d stand out well.  The background here simply happens to be the khaki/taupe color of the house I live in.  In this particular case, because the values are relatively closer and don’t contribute much to separating the flowers from the background, it’s the color that has to do the work, competing for attention, which I think gives the image an energy it wouldn’t otherwise have had.  So my lesson in this is to let go of assumptions and keep my mind and eye open.

Now about my new camera – it’s a Canon Powershot S100 and it suits my needs PERFECTLY!  I love it so much I hope I don’t make my boyfriend jealous.

I already have a Canon SLR film camera with multiple lenses, which served me so well I resisted switching to digital for a long time.  Until I got a little Powershot S70 six years ago.  What a wonder!  I converted to digital immediately.  It looked like a very modest point and shoot, but actually had all the manual controls I was used to on my SLR.  For me it had only one glaring flaw: the manual focusing method, which required inconvenient finger contortions and eyesight good enough to see a tiny inner focus screen.

So eventually I decided to get a new camera and seriously considered a digital SLR.  But here’s why I chose the S100.  Excellent technical features – 12.1 megapixel CMOS sensor (yes, I know megapixel count isn’t everything), lens range equivalent to a 24mm-120mm zoom, very fast new image processor, 3” screen, and many bells and whistles and more bells, such as 3 color histograms in addition to regular light/dark, hi-def movies, GPS.  I AM a clever monkey, but this camera knows more than I do.  You can read more about all that here if you like http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canons100/  Plus fully automatic to fully manual and everything in between.

But beyond that I want a camera I can easily carry with me at all times – the S100 is so small in my purse that I sometimes have to fish around a bit and it’s just not that large a purse.  I want to be able to take candid photos unobtrusively.  My income is modest by American standards, but I want to be able to take photographs in parts of my own city and especially in some foreign countries where I’m rich by local standards. I don’t want to be using a camera that looks very expensive (the little S100 isn’t really cheap at close to $500 including tax and memory card, but it looks insignificant), partly to avoid being ripped off, but mainly and more importantly out of sensitivity to the people I’m among.