Tag: Photography

A Chance Meeting

I have been on holiday in Slovenia and Austria these last couple of weeks.

One evening we were sat in a restaurant in Ljubljana at an outside table, whilst waiting for our food to arrive. I noticed several keen photographers passing the restaurant at intervals of a few minutes. Two or three passed us before I started to think this has to be an organised group of some sort. All of the cameras looked fairly serious, expensive newish model mirrorless or high end DSLRs or one sort or another.

They all looked keen, focused on looking for that must take scene or shot. ‘In the zone’ if you know what I mean.

I had enjoyed taking plenty of photos myself. I regretted not chatting with any of these photographers in Ljubljana.

Today we were on a tram here in Vienna and a young woman and her boyfriend (I presume) got on the tram with us. Both were carrying cameras, but I noticed they also both had film cameras on straps too. He had a Canon EOS300 and she had an Olympus OM2.

I had no clue what nationality they were, but I took a chance and in my native English. I just said

‘Excuse me, it’s nice to see that you are in to film photography as well as digital’

They both smiled and we got in to a great chat about photography for about 10-15 minutes before we arrived at our destinations and we went our own ways.

It turns out they were students on holiday from near Stuttgart in Germany, but their English was perfect. I speak no German at all!

We didn’t swap contact details, I wish I had now, but I didn’t want to appear to be too ‘weird’

It was great to just chat with some other photographers and have an exchange about our mutual interest.

Ljubljana
Vienna tram

Next time you see a photographer, say hello!

Editing Your Images

I’m definitely from the school of photography that started with film photography, therefore there wasn’t much opportunity to edit the images, unless you were processing them yourself in your own darkroom.

Back in the late 1970’s I was living in Milton Keynes and I had access to a community workshop that had its own darkroom and processing equipment and an enlarger etc.

I was also given an old Gnome enlarger by my uncle, it was quite ancient, but I learnt to do black and white printing with it. I was able to do some limited ‘editing’ by cropping the image and ‘dodging’ the image to bring up the shadows and take down the highlights. Lots of waving of hands under the projected image!

I was eventually able to set up my own darkroom in a hall closet for a few years in a small one bedroom apartment I was living in at the time.

I never explored doing colour film processing or printing. Nearly all of my early film photography was done in black and white, something I want to return to very soon. I would send off my colour films to a processing lab to get processed and printed.

With the advent of digital photography we have many tools at our disposal to edit and correct images.

I’m still one for trying to ‘get it right in the camera’ I do not use Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. The subscription costs put me off considering them really.

I use Apple Mac computers (iMac + Macbook Pro) as well as my iPad Pro and iPhone, they are all linked up with the Apple Photos App for the storage of all my images and this offers non-destructive editing of those images.

I try to limit the amount of editing I do to images to cropping and correcting any horizontal/vertical alignment. I will leave all the messing around with layers and presets to you clever folks!

Ivel Mill, Biggleswade, England
Ivel Mill, Biggleswade, England

Camera Bags

We all have obsessions, be it new cameras, old digi-cams, or other items we ‘just like’. Bags of one sort or another can become an obsession.

If you own more than one camera (and who doesn’t!) then I’m sure you have an equal number of camera bags to go with them…. or more!

Look after your camera bag, do the occasional maintenance on it and it will last for years, decades even!

I got back one of my first camera bags recently. I had passed it on to my son years ago, he stopped using it and had moved on to a Peak Design backpack of some type and my old camera bag sat collecting dust along with a Canon EOS600D he wasn’t using. He passed on to me the bag and the camera! Double Win!! (Centre bottom in the photo)

I had forgotten all about this bag, it was looking a little sorry for itself. But I emptied it out and went to work with a soft bush and the vacuum cleaner, then the soft bush and some upholstery cleaner and it came up looking quite respectable. Ready for another orbit of the globe!

Over the years I have moved to different brands of bags. I had a phase of using Lowepro bags and pouches in various sizes, I have quite a few of their bags. Some bought to be used as camera bags, a couple that I have used as a ‘man bag’ but occasionally as a travel bag or camera bag.

Camera bags make great general travel bags for your personal items, electronics etc. With a soft interior lining and dividers you can easily locate things inside your bag during your journey or at your destination. A quick scan of the bag lets you know if you have left something behind etc.

I still have and occasionally use a Lowepro Mini Trekker bag (Back left in the photo) from the late 1990’s. The only thing that has needed replacing is the elastics, which my wife did an excellent job of changing. It is a smallish backpack, but not too heavy when full and you are on your feet in a town or city for a number of hours. It fits in to most airline carry on limits too.

The different limits of different carriers is a major bug-bear of any traveller these days. There’s no one standard limit. There are size limits and weight limits.

That brings me to the largest camera bag in my collection! The Think Tank Photo Airport Commuter. (Back right in the photo) I bought this for our tour of USA and Canada in 2015, I was able to fit all my camera gear, laptop and iPad and all the cables and adaptors etc in to the one bag. Fully loaded though it was close to the carry on weight limit!

I’ve used this bag quite a bit on non-air flight trips, when going by car or train. It’s brilliant with a suitcase/holdall, I am fully prepared for anything. It can take a couple of camera bodies and a variety of lenses, a Macbook Pro plus a tablet and everything is stored neatly inside.

One of my favourite bags for photo walks is my Lowepro Orion AW (Top centre in the photo). It’s a two part bag, the main camera bag and also a rucksack add-on. I tend to just use the camera bag on its own. It will take a full size DSLR with battery grip and some extra gear as well. With the waist strap taking some of the load, it is not so bad on the shoulders. With the top hinging away from your body you can easily access the inside of the bag to do a quick lens swap.

Smaller bags also have their place in anyones collection. I have a couple of Lowepro Nova bags (Front left and right in the photo), they can take a camera, lens, spare lens and some batteries etc. They a compact, but still nicely padded inside to protect your gear and have a generous size shoulder strap.

Choosing a camera bag is a very personal thing, it will depend on how much you need to carry with you. I like having a range of sizes to choose from. I hate having a bag that is way too big. Having one that is the right size for what I’m carrying is just perfect.

What is your favourite camera bag? Please comment below.

Thank you once again for joining me.

Nikon Camera Settings

I’ve had the Nikon D300 since August 2021, it was a gift from a friend, the camera was her late husbands. Fortunately the camera came with the manual and three books dedicated to the D300. I was also given quite a few accessories and lenses too.

I’ve since added an additional lens the Nikon 10-20mm wide angle zoom to go with the 18-200mm I regularly use on the D300.

I was surprised how many accessories are still available for the D300 given how long it has been discontinued. Although I suspect the accessories are common to later cameras.

I bought a couple of new batteries as I didn’t know the history of the original ones that came with the camera.

Having got over the initial steep learning curve of discovering where all the settings where located on the camera. Manual in one hand camera in the other!

I enjoy using the camera, but I feel like I could get more out of the camera with some fine tuning of the settings.

Another dive in to the manual and books showed me that the Nikon D300 as well as other Nikon’s have a set of memories called ‘Shooting Banks’ and ‘Custom Setting Banks’ These let you set the camera up with different parameters for different types of shots and then you can easily change from one set of settings to another by just going from one ‘bank’ to another ‘bank’

None of my Canon cameras have this type of feature you have to change all the individual settings to your choices.

In the book: David Busch’s Nikon D300: Digital SLR Photography he has dedicated a long chapter on how to set up the memory banks with a set of suggested settings for the camera in different scenarios.

I will be going through this chapter in detail to optimise the settings on my camera. I think it will be time well spent.

Canon Powershot SX120is

We bought this camera in about 2010, it replaced a previous 2004 model of Canon Powershot camera (S60?) that had become faulty and it was sadly beyond economic repair.

My wife used the SX120is for a few years until she got an iPhone and then eventually the Canon was tucked away in a small camera case and forgotten about… that is until recently!

The SX120is boasts a 10MP CCD sensor, oh yes it has those three important letters on the spec sheet… I hadn’t realised it until I was researching the camera in more detail and that made me want to look in to it a bit more.

After all it’s a camera we already own, so no trawling Ebay or similar for other cameras that are increasing in price after been highlighted on a You Tube video somewhere 😉

The lens zoom range is quoted as being 36-360mm F2.8-F4.3, I tend to use it at the wide end and rarely use the zoom capability which is via the normal rocker control on the top of the camera surrounding the shutter release button.

The camera can shoot in Manual, Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority, and Program Modes. It has a glut of scene modes too, which I’ve never really attempted to get my head around. It does video but it’s not very impressive at 640×480 at 30f.p.s. not that video is of any interest to me!

The camera uses two AA batteries, whilst it recommends rechargeable NiMH batteries it seems to fail on low battery with those very quickly these days, so a setting internally needs recalibrating I suspect. I use it on normal batteries instead. A small CR1220 battery keeps the internal clock (date and time) alive.

Storage is via an SD card in the base of the camera where the batteries slot in. The camera only shoots in JPEG, sadly no RAW format in camera is available. The results are reasonably good though.

There is no viewfinder, but there is a 3 inch screen on the back, which is clear enough in most situations.

For more details on specs and reviews etc see DPReview.

And some sample photos taken recently with the camera without any editing. Just my usual countryside walk local to our house on a fairly grey overcast day in March. Yes the river is in full flood at the moment! But our house is a good 50 metres above the river.

One of the things I really like about this camera and this type of camera is how you can tuck it in a jacket pocket and have a camera with you can still take reasonable photos and you feel more involved in the process compared to using a smart phone camera.

#nobadcameras #ccdcameras #canon #digicam