Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Losing touch with reality

Amateur photographers have lost touch with reality. Yes, that's right. Read that again - amateur photographers have lost touch with reality. I'm not talking about professional photographers - most of them have already realised that photography is ever less lucrative to the point that most now do not use photography as their sole income.

Some manufacturer comes out with the latest whiz-bang camera that takes photos, makes the tea, pops out slices of ready-buttered toast cut neatly into soldiers and all the amateurs immediately hawk their current cameras on ebay to rush off and buy the latest creation. It's been utterly ridiculous for years. First the madheads rushed off to buy 2 and 3 megapixel digital SLRs - as though they were actually worth paying money for. To cap it all, they paid thousands for them. They broke the unwritten rule that you never buy electronics when they first come out unless you have no money sense whatsoever. As if that wasn't enough, they fell for the advertiser's bullshit about last year's model not being as good as this year's model. They repeated the process!

Judging by the way manufacturers slowly leaked out minor increases in sensor sizes, milking the market each time, enough amateurs fell for that to keep the process going for a good few years. All it takes to keep a scam like that going is enough suckers to fall for it. Let's have a good look at megapixels.

When I started in digital photography, I bought a 3 megapixel compact which I used extensively. It didn't have a long zoom and recorded only 15 second clips of silent video. Most people today would turn their delicate little noses up at 3 megapixels yet a 3 megapixel image will yield a nice 10x8 print and possibly bigger. How many prints are hanging on walls bigger than 10x8? Not many - that's how many. Then a friend gave me a 3 megapixel superzoom which also did video. The compact failed after 6 years use and about 4,000 photos. The superzoom failed at about the same time but failed of a known manufacturing defect so it was sent back for a free repair and still works to this day though it doesn't get used much now. I did not go for multiple upgrades and camera after camera as megapixels crept from 3 to 4 to 5 to 6 to 8 etc. I looked at the advertisers' baloney the first year and recognised it as baloney.

Eventually I got a digital SLR with an 8 megapixel sensor. Sadly, I bought that while it was still quite expensive though not at the brand spanking new prices. I still use that 8 megapixel digital SLR. I checked the other day and the price had fallen from $1,200 when it was newly released to $30 on the secondhand market. That took 7 years. I use cameras that are between 7 and 10 years old or very much out of date.
As far as I am concerned, the photos from my 7 year old digital SLR that is now worth almost nothing are pretty darned good.

There was a time when I thought a lot of stabilised lenses. I'm not such a fan of them any more. They're very nice and I can get some great photos from them but I can also get some absolutely ghastly photos when they go bananas - which they do. I have seen the image jumping about through the viewfinder and had to switch both camera and lens off in order to cure the problem. I was very much a fan of stabilised lenses when I found I could take hand-held photos in low light with them. Now, I'm not so much of a fan because I think I get better photos out of my non-stabilised lenses. The above photo was from a stabilised lens. The below photo was from a non-stabilised lens.
This was taken with a non-stabilised, hand held Tamron 17-35 that I got secondhand for almost nothing. The resolution is great. The problem with stabilised lenses is they tend to want to stabilise already stable images which degrades the images very slightly. They also lull people into a false sense of security as they only stabilise in certain planes.

Amateurs, needless to say have fallen for the stabilised lens baloney and tend to buy only stabilised lenses. I bought one and liked it initially so I bought another. Now I'm not keen on either, hence I put them up for sale.

I enjoyed my photography the most when I used manual focus cameras with manual exposure only. I had to think about what I was doing more than I do with these electronic things. Similarly, with my old manual flash, I used to work out the exposures in my head rather than relying upon some electronic thing to get it right. I miss having control over all the aspects of photography from exposure to flash control etc that I used to have with film. I miss having a depth of field scale on the lens. These electronic calculation apps we can have on our phones just don't give me the quality of information that the scales used to give. With that scale I could ensure everything between two points was in focus. I can't do that with these wretched calculators. I can't even work out where exactly the lens is focussing as there's nothing worthwhile in the way of a distance scale any more.

Amateurs fall for all the "advances" believing that they will make their own photography match that of the professionals. In fact what will advance their photography is getting out and taking better pictures and doing it more often. Amateurs need to forget about all the stupid rules like the rule of thirds. They need to forget about all the "experts" they meet online and in real life. They need to get out and take pictures and to stop worrying if they're breaking some rule or other.

My ideal camera would not have 90% of the fancy features. It would have a shutter speed dial with an aperture priority setting, ISO controls and basic view/review/delete controls for the LCD. It would in effect be a Nikon F3 in digital. 

Digital cameras are just too darned complicated. If I need to carry the manual with me to work out how to operate funky features like second curtain synch etc then the camera is too complicated. I don't want features I'll use maybe once in a blue moon. Amateurs seem crazy on having every damned feature they can think of even though it makes the camera into an unwieldy monstrosity. Most of these digital cameras are monstrosities these days. Amateurs buying into it all is what's driving manufacturers to put all the garbage onto cameras. I don't want a camera that will brew the tea and make sandwiches. I want a camera that I can work with.

Lenses - as I've already said - the image stabilisation feature is interesting but adds to problems. The autofocus thing adds to laziness and problems. Give me a good old manual focus lens with my digital camera and give me back my freznel rings and split screens! Keep the weight of the old film cameras though - I prefer the more modern lightweight systems.

Amateurs have largely forgotten what it is to make a photograph - they let the camera do all the work without any basic understanding of the process. Many cannot understand the relationship between aperture, shutter speed and ISO. Most won't even know what this symbol means  0  on their camera bodies. It is most assuredly on my 7 year old Canon XT. 

Amateurs through the advancement of technology have completely lost touch with the reality of photography. They clamor for ever more crap on their cameras, grade cameras by megapixels, focussing speed and a whole load of irrelevant garbage that actually gets in the way of taking good photos.

Many amateurs laugh at the so-called "MWAC" - mom with a camera who goes out and sells their skills with a camera for money without ever knowing quite why the camera does what it does. Those amateurs are not much behind MWACs for lack of photographic knowledge. It's a sobering thought that the unskilled people of old who were unable to load film into their cameras or to take a photo without their finger in front of the lens now own digital cameras and call themselves amateurs.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Food for thought


I bet you're wondering whether I've gone crackers! No - the point is, this photo was taken with my cellphone camera. It really is quite a decent photo for a camera as casual as a cellphone camera. This was actually my dinner - everything there is healthy down to the beanburger. Actually, one of my friends looked in my fridge one time and exclaimed "there's nothing there I can eat - all this is healthy food!" but that's a story for another time.

How do you define a photograph? At what point do you decide you have got enough photo quality? In the days of film, there were many film formats:
  • 110 - this was the smallest. This was made from 16mm cine film
  • 35mm - this was the most common and made from 35mm cinema film.
  • 120 - this was less common and produced more professional results
  • Sheet film - this came in sizes such as 5x7, 10x8 etc and was for ultimate quality.

I have taken great photos with all of these film formats. All it takes is perseverance.

Now we use digital and without a shadow of a doubt I will say that 8 megapixels of any digital camera are far superior to anything I could produce with 35mm. The question now is what size of sensor do you want. They seem to be various sizes.
  • Pentax Q is the smallest with a 1/1.7" sensor. 
  • Nikon 1 with a CX sensor - bigger
  • APS-C - bigger again
  • "full frame" - the same size as 35mm

All of these will produce a good photo. The photo above was taken with a 1/4" sensor on my Nexus 4. It's quite good though noise is present in the image. Is this unacceptable though? In my opinion it is not unacceptable. What would be unacceptable would be color bias or blur or any form of distortion. That's not present though.

People argue this way and that for different sensor sizes with the general argument being that bigger is better. Yes I will agree bigger is usually better but at what cost? How much better is a "full frame" sensor over an APS-C sensor? I know it's almost twice the size but is it that much better? To be brutally honest, it is not. The same for differences between all the sensors. Where a difference will be noticeable is in lower light levels where the larger sensors collect more photons than the smaller sensors. That is the sole advantage of the larger sensors. This has a knock-on effect of meaning that higher ISOs will have progressively more digital noise as a side-effect in progressively smaller sensors. My Nexus 4 sensor can be very noisy at times.

So, the question is - does a smaller sensor make an image somehow unacceptable? If you listen to the pundits, only the full frame sensor will do. I have heard so many supporting arguments for full frame sensors that you'll be shocked to realize I think very little of such arguments. The sole argument away from the smallest sensors is that the smaller sensors don't have very wide-angle lenses. Otherwise, there is no reason on earth to follow the baloney about using "full frame" sensors.

The smaller the sensor, the more care needs to be taken to obtain the best image quality. All digital cameras now produce images well in excess of what we could produce with film cameras. Why do we keep moving the goalposts? I think a lot too many people believe the marketing and advertising baloney that we're constantly fed. I challenged somebody to produce good photographs using the Nikon 1 system without a viewfinder and in low light. You know what? They did. I was impressed. Now I need to challenge the Pentax Q people to the same thing!

I don't believe in sensor size superiority. For the average amateur even a Pentax Q sensor should be adequate. What we have to do is to work with what we have rather than to go for bigger and better all the time. If we work around our equipment then we get results. If we get equipment that works around us then we go bankrupt.

My advice is just to go simple. I'm simplifying my camera gear. I was never intended to be a professional photographer. I enjoy my photography. I am heading back to being an amateur. Being an amateur does not mean I cannot sell prints or do photo jobs or write books. It just means that it is not a career or a job. It might sound strange but all I ever wanted to be was an amateur photographer that sold the odd print etc. 

I heard from a professional photographer today. He applauded my decision to go back to being an amateur and agreed with all of my points against doing photography professionally. All his usual work had dried up and he was relegated solely to doing stock photography. That's something that's in its last gasp too since microstock came out. Millions of quite good amateurs produce excellent microstock and are happy to get paid pennies for it so the microstock agencies can charge less. Sounds like a vicious cycle to me. I still believe professional photography is doomed. In fact, even he said photography is "like toilet-paper, cheap and disposable".

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Knowing is half the battle

Knowing that Google is going to animate your images is half the battle. I can take as I said a day or two back, a mundane record photo and turn it into something special. Normally I would not get too excited about a side-on photo of an elephant but an elephant that is obviously alive and moving? Now that's something special.


I know they're horribly slow to load but they are fun. Both of these come from a sequence of photos shot hand-held with absolutely no tripod nor any other support at all. They were both shot on a cloudy day at quite high ISO which means that technically they're not as good as I would have liked. Having said that, the uniqueness of the images in motion more than makes up for that.

Technical details? I can't remember what I used to take these photos and there's no exif information in a GIF to help out. I'm not so sure I like the way Google has enhanced the images. I know they were taken at about 3pm - 4pm but the sun doesn't set until about 9pm so they shouldn't have golden hour lighting. Having said that, it's not unpleasant.

I am going to have to say that I really like what Google is doing these days. If you ignore the lack of privacy aspects of some of the Google operations, what they're doing seems to be very good indeed. I particularly like the way I can link my Chrome browser on my Mac to my Nexus 4. I gather a Chromebook would be the next level in linkage. My only criticism of the Chromebook is that they're not made quite as well as my Mac. I've had my Mac for 5 years and upgraded the operating system once. It's still as good as it was when it was new. Had I had a Windows laptop, I'd have had to upgrade twice already.

I did look into Android tablets to display my photos. I was not very impressed by those I saw though. The Apple iPads are very nice indeed and would talk nicely to my Macbook. The Android tablets don't cooperate well with Mac though I'm sure they would with a Chromebook. PC's I'm not so sure about.

What you're buying into with Android or Apple is an ecosystem. All Apple products talk nicely to each other. All Android products talk nicely to each other. PCs have been notorious for not talking nicely to anything, preferring their own protocol instead of industry standard protocols.

I had an Android tablet. It was a Nook Color. That was pretty good in a dry room. South Carolina is a humid place and so unsurprisingly, it went bananas. It was OK most of the time in the house but anywhere there was humidity, it was appalling. I got it for about $90 and struggled, 6 months later to get $30 for it. In the end I was getting so desperate to offload it before it got any more out of date that it went for $30. It was a case of either letting it go for that or taking it up to the shooting range to use it as a target.

One of the things that seems utterly bonkers to me is how a small Android tablet can cost more than a larger Chromebook which has the advantage of having a physical keyboard. I never will figure the genius thinking behind that pricing strategy. I would always rather a keyboard.

Looking at tablets, my other gripe is that they have the wrong screen aspect. Photographs are either 4:3 or 3:2 ratio. The iPad is 4:3 which is perfect for most compact camera users. Most tablets are 16:10 ratio which is not close to a digital SLR, 3:2 or a compact's 4:3. For displaying photographs that means either zooming and hence cropping or wasting screen real-estate. Let's face it, tablet screens are quite small. They're certainly not as big as a 10x8 print.

I have a feeling that there's more development needed in the tablet market yet.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Moving images


I am hugely entertained by Google's GIF creations from my existing photographs. Somehow they make some quite mundane photos look really good. After I discovered Google did this, I started shooting batches of photos. Clearly all these GIFs take a long time to download - particularly on slower connections but I like them and I'm going to be very sparing with their use. 

The whole animated images thing gives me lots of new ideas for my photography. It lends it a whole new lease of life. It's like short videos without having to bother doing video. The only trick is to remain still while taking a series of photos, if subsequent animation is desired.

Friday, October 25, 2013

Popularity

Does popularity matter?
I see a whole load of posts online saying things like:

  • How do I get Facebook followers,
  • How do I get Twitter followers,
  • How do I get blog followers,
  • How do I get visitors to my website,
  • How do I get Tumblr followers,
  • How do I get Instagram followers,
  • How do I get Pinterest followers,
  • How do I get followers for <insert site name>?

The fact is, it doesn't matter. Once you tread down the path of caring how many followers you have, you are already on the road toward being addicted to the medium and paying for followers. Once you go down that road, you might as well open your wallet and start spending money in the red light district. At least that way you might possibly get something in return for your money. Money spent on fake followers and fake page views is wasted.

How can I raise my page views? Simply - I can go to the site hit counter and change the numbers. Et voila, I now have 10,000,000 extra page views that I know darned well are fake and which importantly didn't cost me a bean. I could go the hard way and simply keep clicking refresh (which is all the fake page hits sites do - you're paying for fake site visits and for web bots to visit your site).

The same goes for followers on just about every other website. The only followers you can buy will be web bots. I look at one of my old Twitter accounts - 10,000 followers and none of them are actually human or respond to direct messages or to general tweets. I look at the Tweets I am mentioned in or the direct messages I get and they are all so clearly bot originated. This is why I left my auto-tweeters blasting away on full auto and started @Valyrie_2. I do have a couple of automatic tweets on that but only that say where I should be located and that's so my friends can find me without having to phone. I have about 13 followers on that account and I don't interact with any of them. None of my friends seem to bother with Twitter either.

So, back to my original statement. Does it really matter if you have followers etc? No - it does not. As far as I am concerned, my blog does have a few followers. Some are desirable and some are undesirable.  I can't stop the undesirables from reading what I put in a public area. On the other hand, I tailor my postings so that they don't include anything personal that they can twist and warp into things that they are not. Recently I had to dump one of my Chinese contacts because she started to warp and twist my messages and to tell me that I'd said things I had not and started to call me a liar. Twice I tried to calm her down and straighten things out but on the 3rd occasion I just said that once is unfortunate, twice is a coincidence, three times is a blocked contact. Out of decency I did state that I was feeling manipulated and that was why I was blocking her.  I was not prepared to give a 4th opportunity as the precedent had been demonstrated.

As I have said before, I was seduced into starting a photography business. I was shown how easy it was just to take pictures and make money if only I spent money on the gear. That there is right where I should have stopped. It's a cardinal rule never to spend money to make money. I see all the scam adverts in the papers for pyramid schemes or as they call them MLM (multi-level-marketing) where you buy a kit that allows you to sell kits to other suckers in the chain.

I never managed to get visitors to my website when I had a photography website. I never managed to get anybody to call having seen my advertising. I never managed to find anybody with even the slightest interest in hiring a photographer or even with the slightest interest in seeing a portfolio. Indeed, I spent most of the 5 miserable years of running a photography business without even bothering to put together a portfolio. Nobody asked to see it so there was no point in putting one together. I had a rather nice leather binder that took 11x14 prints. I never had any 11x14 prints to put in it though. The level of interest in photography was such that I just didn't feel like spending more money on prints.

Popularity is a hard nut to crack. It cannot be cracked by throwing money at the issue. Just like all the online stuff, it can only be cracked by making local contacts. Local contacts will gain contacts further afield until eventually popularity is reached. The sad thing is - locally, nobody was interested in photography. The popularity of the digital medium means that as cellphones produce images of adequate online resolution, people use them almost exclusively because almost exclusively they only view them online or on tablets. The physical print has all but died out. Everybody shares family photos online now. Thus, demand for real photography has dropped to an all time low. Think of a similarity between the carving skills of old where there was a lot of intricately carved coving in houses that is now replaced by cast plaster coving. It looks similar but it's cheaper. It looks cheaper but people don't care about quality. They care about their budget. Another photographer's website is like those appalling family albums that used to get dragged out and hapless guests made to view. A photographers website will never be popular. It is thus unsurprising that mine never got viewers. It is also unsurprising that my business never had enough business to make it worthwhile. It was just unfortunate that I had allowed myself to ignore reality when I did my research before starting the business.

When I started, I looked to see where photographers advertised, figuring that if they were advertising there then so should I. I looked to see how many weddings there were without seeing how many photographers there were. There were a lot of things I missed out on. I did write a business plan but never used it and never saw much point to it. Looking back, there was so much missing in my research due to clouded thinking that I'm amazed I considered it to be research. Over the ensuing period, I tried to popularise my business, hoping vainly that each year would be better than the next. Finally, I realised it was pointless to keep throwing money at advertising and killed off the advertising. Then I realised that there was no business anyway so I might as well sell everything and put up the shutters. That allows me the freedom to enjoy photography again. Whether I will sell everything or just the garbage that I don't need remains to be seen. I hear all the arguments for different sensor sizes but don't see much evidence to back up any of the arguments. Watch this space for further developments.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Good money and bad money

Many photographers fall into the trinket buying trap. It's an easy one to fall into - it's like magpies that see shiny objects. The Simpsons parodied this with women's fascination for jewelry with a chant that went "shiny, shiny, shiny". Another similar thing would be buying trash for your car. When it comes time to sell, beaded seat-covers, fancy grills, fancy wheels, fancy radios, fancy upholstery won't change the fact that to the next owner, they're just embarrassing add-ons that the previous owner put on that he will want a discount when he buys the car from you in order to suffer.

Photographers used to be bad for buying filters and companies used to produce every filer under the sun. With black and white, only polarizing, red, orange, green and yellow filters were worthwhile. The rest were just garbage. Photos could be soft-focussed quite well in the darkroom. Starbursts could be achieved with the smallest possible aperture. With color film, photographers used to mess about with graduated filters of various types and colors. The fact is that the only filter worth having was always the polarizer. The rest were just garbage. They sold though and some pretentions and naive individual usually bought them.

Now that digital is here, people are finally realising that all they need is a polariser. Anything else can be faked after the fact. It still doesn't change the fact that all people want and all magazines want is a good clear photo. They don't want anything that makes them run, vomiting to the bathroom. This is possibly finally getting through to people since for a long time, digital cameras were unable to accept filters and thus people didn't use them and got out of the bad filter habit.

The manufacturers of garbage and cheap knick-knacks have not lain idle though. They still produce garbage and con people into buying it. The current fad is flash modifiers that allegedly diffuse the light to make it look more natural. Well baloney to that - a flash photo looks like a flash photo whether it is a bare flash tube bounced off the ceiling, blasted straight at the subject or has some form of plastic pot placed over the flash. It doesn't matter if the plastic pot has a fancy label on it and was made by a beautiful woman in a factory where clothing was banned. It still doesn't change the fact that the flash is a tiny point of low-quality artificial light. There's a good reason these plastic pots aren't supplied by flash manufacturers - they don't work. Sure, many people kid themselves that they do but there's nothing they can do that can't be done with proper technique.

Gadget bags - people are so afraid of bashing their pretty lenses and camera bodies. Why? Because they know they're going to want to sell them at some point. Well, here's a newsflash - camera bodies sell for almost nothing secondhand. As for camera lenses, they sell for about 50% of their new value, secondhand and go down to about 25% of their new value if they're bashed to heck. What does this mean for all you out there? Simple - buy second hand and toss them in your bag. A $600 lens will be worth $300 so you buy it secondhand for $300 and toss it in your bag, knowing that even with the heck bashed out of it, you'll get $150 for it. In any case, the most padding you'll ever need on a lens or a body is a towel. Toss your lenses wrapped in towels into you back pack and they will be fine. You don't need expensive gadget bags that look like walking advertisements for expensive gear.

Lenses - why do people buy so many darned lenses? People that think they're going to go professional immediately think they need backups of backups. It's not so. One body and one lens is fine for most things. Grab yourself the equivalent of a 24 - 90 and you'll be fine for 90% of situations. The other 10% is not worth bothering about. Really, seriously, people will buy a 2,000mm lens knowing they will use it maybe once in a blue moon. That's an utter waste of money. For the price of a lens like that, hire the damned thing, pay less and don't have capital tied up in garbage.

I don't have any tolerance for photography bullshit. Read any internet forum and you'll get all the 12 year olds responding, repeating what they have heard some other 12 year old say on another internet forum. Ask for an opinion on a lens and you'll get everybody swearing a certain lens is excellent or bad or whatever and I guarantee - none of them have ever used that lens. You'll get a ton of them with websites listed as though it was their website and I guarantee none of them have anything to do with those websites as the websites are not theirs.

There are all the other gadgets too - light meters, flash meters, funky flash outfits, studio set ups etc. None of this is needed by amateurs. It's all expensive stuff that professionals used to be able to afford when professional photography existed. Now it's only the amateurs that can afford it so it's marketed to amateurs but made to look like it's for professionals. Nobody needs all this stuff.

Let's look at cheap ways of doing things... A white reflector? What's wrong with a sheet of paper or a piece of white card? Studio lighting? What's wrong with a couple of angle-poise lamps with more powerful bulbs or perhaps some cheap halogen work lights? A fancy backdrop and backdrop stand? What's wrong with a bedsheet pinned to the ceiling or wall or hung on a piece of string or even taped to a piece of plastic tubing from the hardware store? Flashes have to be by the camera manufacturer because the warranty says so? No - they don't. Just get the cheapest darned flash that will do the job. So it might take several seconds to charge - are you really in a great rush? Don't get equipment that works around you, get equipment that you can work around. The former will bankrupt you quickly while the latter saves you money. I guarantee you will bore of doing one type of photography all the time.

Many amateurs see "professional" as being something to aspire to. It's not - all professional means is that you advertise, charge money and spend your life making photography from what used to be a pleasure into an interminable chore. Then there's not just the loss of pleasure of photography but the non-paying "clients", the annoying and finicky clients, the clients that you just wish you'd never even picked up the phone to answer plus the clients that are quite frankly, assholes.

Good money is money spent that recoups its value. Bad money never does. Bad money is money spent on expensive trinkets that don't return than much in pleasure. If you're afraid of getting your equipment stolen, insurance is not the answer. The answer is that you've bought stuff that's too expensive for your income. Most people would love to drive a Ferrari Testarossa every day but we can't afford it so we drive a Ford Pinto. The only difference is looks - the practical function is identical.

How do I go out with my camera? I select my wide to medium telephoto zoom and go out with one body and one lens. Occasionally I might get out there with a second lens which will usually be medium telephoto to long telephoto. I can guarantee that I will usually have the wrong lens on the body for the situation. Take the other day when I was at the zoo, I wanted a nice close-up of a lioness roaring but there were two problems. One was that I have an older camera that does not do video and the other was that I had the short lens on instead of the long one. It was something I missed so I just watched instead.


Next time I might be lucky and have the right lens on or I could be unlucky and have the wrong lens. To be honest, it was the wrong day - it was too cloudy and grim to take great photos with a long lens anyway. I was struggling even at 1600ISO to get clean photos. Part of the problem can be attributed to my lens which does occasionally over-compensate for stabilisation errors. Sometimes it goes plain bananas and has to be switched off then on again. In general I am not keen on stabilised lenses. It's just another thing that can and does cause issues at times.

The KISS principal of Keep It Simple, Stupid, applies very much to photography. Keep things simple - the simpler the system, the lenses or the cameras, the more pleasure you're going to get. Forget about income - that's a myth. Ok. let's look at that myth of income....

How do you get money from a camera? Sell the camera! It's that simple, really. I look at myself and my family. We have never ever hired a photographer. One of us usually has a camera or these days a cellphone with a camera on us. I don't know anybody that actually has hired a photographer. Those who have hired wedding photographers usually seem to hate the photos that the photographer takes and has usually considered suing them. Wedding photographers give such an air of expertise and 90% are complete fakers. There just aren't enough weddings for every expert wedding photographer to have covered those they claim to have. It's so easy to build a fake portfolio by buying other people's photos or copying them from magazines and the internet.

Keep photography simple. A camera and one or two lenses. I guarantee you won't need more. Those you think you'll need will be lenses that you think you'll use a lot but which in actual fact will spend 90% of your camera time, nestling in your camera bag. Lighting and studio stuff - as much as you can put together for as little as possible using dual purpose household gear. I guarantee it will have more worth as household gear. My tabletop studio is lit with... two $12 desk lamps. The photo below was lit with one desk lamp and had a sheet of black card behind and a sheet of glossy card underneath. I wanted to make it stand out a bit by putting it on a black background. There are a couple of things to improve upon but it's really not bad. One day I might revisit this project. The main trick aside from some slight photo editing is to ensure that the light falls only where it is needed. That's not really too hard - it goes in straight lines. If you use an LED light bulb, the lines are even straighter and simpler than normal.
Somebody will doubtless want to poke holes in every photo you or I take. They're full of their own baloney. The vast majority of their own photos are not as good. If you believe the rubbish they will tell you, you'll get disillusioned, believe your photography isn't any good and you'll lose a hobby. These are what used to be called the killjoys because they go around killing people's happiness for their own feeling of self-importance. The really laugh with those people is that they can't even take pictures the way they're telling you to. Their general answer is to buy everything and of course they own nothing that they claim to own.

As I've said, I got seduced into buying everything to be a professional photographer. I've been there and seen that it's all baloney. Nobody hires photographers. Businesses don't - they use staff members who do it for fun. Occasionally they might hire an amateur. There is absolutely no way to make a living off photography and anybody that claims to is a liar.

Most cameras have built-in flashes so you don't even need to buy a flash. I saw one enlightened wedding photographer using the kit lens that came with their camera and the onboard flash. That means that their expenditure was minimal and their income was thus maximised. The easiest thing in the world is to spend money but to spend it wisely is harder. Try my challenge - can you get away with one body and one or two lenses for a complete year? If you can then sell all the rest - you don't need it because you haven't used it in a year. If you can't then you're either doing something very specialised or you're not taking the challenge seriously.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

A non-decision

I'm coming toward a non-decision. I don't believe that the market for smaller sensor mirrorless cameras has really matured yet. I'm also of the opinion that occasionally an optical sight does help though that could be something simply slipped into a hotshoe mount in very much the way the auxiliary viewfinder filled onto the Leica S and Leica M rangefinder series cameras. It's not an insurmountable issue.

I went to the zoo yesterday and took a few photos (256 in all) with the emphasis on continuous shooting (until I filled the camera's buffer which seemed to be 10 photos). Google has a funky way of doing things that means 5 similar images can be combined to make an animation automatically. It's part of Google's image recognition system and it's rather fun.
While I can't show more than one at a time on my blog pages without slowing people's computers down terribly, I can put one on and demonstrate what a fun thing these animations are. I went out and took photos using my existing camera gear. I missed one lovely thing that everybody with a zoom compact just flipped the thing into working as a video camera as I don't have the ability to do video on my digital SLR - it's way too elderly for that. A lioness decided to stand and roar though at what I don't know. The lion didn't look very interested. It was very interesting as I'd never heard a lioness roaring before.

The only actual video I managed was one of the aquarium and that was done on my cellphone. Clearly video is something I really need to think about.
Again what Google has done is to put a GIF as a thumbnail for the video. That's very interesting. I'm actually quite impressed by the things Google are doing at the moment. At the moment I use an Apple Mac and was going to get myself an iPhone to get into Apple world. I couldn't afford the entry price of the iPhone and got a Nexus 4 instead. That got me more into Google world. Since then I have seen Google's tablets and Google's Chromebook laptop and how it all ties in with Google into a Google world. I must admit I like Google's ideas although it's all designed to sell their cloud services.

So where is my non-decision? I'm still pretty sure that the market for mirrorless compacts isn't yet mature enough to merit spending money on them yet. My current cameras do work. I'm working on selling the expensive flashes and once that's done, all the stuff that will depreciate will have been sold as has the bulky studio garbage. My decision is to sit on the fence for a while longer.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Suzy Q and photography

Well, not quite Suzy Q but Pentax Q. Today I looked at the results of various of the smaller sensor interchangeable lens cameras and came to the conclusion that there's nothing really separating any of them for performance. The lenses all seem equally decent. The images they produce all seem equally decent. I really don't see an awful lot of difference bar brand name other than perhaps in the high ISO image rendition. There, it is noticeable that smaller sensors produce worse results. To be honest though - they all seem pretty equal up to ISO 800. I think I would be happy using any of them.

Meanwhile, I took another photo of my little green and orange bus. There's just something about the colors that make it appear not quite sharp. I'm not sure what that is. I notice this with a lot of photographs that I take. The camera was on a tripod. The exposure was 30 seconds at f8 and the focal point was on the nearest corner of the white line on the bus.
If you look at the lines, everything is sharp. Look at the colors and it's not. It's almost as though the colors are focussing in the wrong place. The text on the sign is sharp. The red and green are just not that sharp. It's a bit bizarre. The camera was correctly focus-locked on the bus though. The business cards in the foreground are sharp. The clock in the background is sharp. There's just something not quite right there. I never used to have this problem when I used Nikon. I'm beginning to wonder if Canon lenses just aren't that great. There was no filter and the lens was clean.

Meanwhile, on another issue, I was chatting to somebody at work about photography. It seems that we all know the same "professional" photographers. There's one who's a real pest - continually buying things from the company website then returning them to the store. What he does is to photograph them for a website. What he's doing is buying the products then returning them after using them. It's definitely exploiting a gap in the extremely liberal return policy. Everybody is afraid to say no to taking things back. Needless to say, I have not seen very many photographers that have been at all honest.

Years ago I saw a biopic of a photographer who used to pawn his camera gear until he had a client then he'd buy it back and take the clients money, pretend to take a photo and then claim it didn't come out so he'd then use the money from his second client to buy his film back, then he'd "retake" both sets of pictures and so on. He was about as disreputable as the glazier in Charlie Chaplin films who would write the name of his glazing firm around a brick and would lob the brick through a window.

In the past, I knew one fellow who was a photographer who spent brief periods of affluence interspersed with longer periods on welfare. He couldn't make photography work as an income and just took money from the state rather than trying to get a real job. I know a large number of photographers locally that are either dependent upon somebody else or who have a real job that finances their photography business. This is no way to be. Yet all of them will lie and say that they are making a load of money.

I got pretty much ostracised the other day for saying that I couldn't make photography pay. One of the organisations I was a member of suddenly told me that my membership had been deactivated then did not respond to further emails. Clearly it's not possible to tell the truth. If the truth offends people then they're not people I need to know in the first place. Isn't that interesting - we seem to be getting to an inexplicable link between photographers and lack of honesty. Whichever way we look at it, photographers never seem to be that honest. A photographer was hired for one occasion that I was involved with. The photographs were awful - color casts galore, grain like golf balls and ridiculously underexposed. They charged plenty though.

I am very glad that I am an amateur photographer. I could never tell the amount of lies needed nor use and abuse people in the manner needed to be a professional photographer. This is quite likely why I never managed to make professional photography pay. I enjoy my photography and am in the midst of downsizing.

Going back to the Suzy Q reference, I really love photography. I love the pictures I create. I don't care anything for making photography into an art form though. I don't see the need to have huge cameras either now that we have gone digital. I would go for a superzoom but for the fact that their image quality isn't that great. I might have to try one again though. I expect that the image quality is now vastly superior to that of my elderly Canon S1 IS. As my photos are for myself only and for publication either online or in my books, I don't really need a huge professional camera setup any more. I need something that will do what I want to do.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Dog tired

It is hard to imagine how tired I get working an 8 hour day with the public, in sales then coming home to study a course for a few hours and also work on a blog. I have no time whatsoever to run a photography business as well.

Today I had a great compliment or perhaps it wasn't. Somebody stated that taking photography seriously was not mutually exclusive to having a great blog. Now that could have been a rhetorical comment or it could have been praise for my blog. I'm going to say that there's a fair chance that somebody enjoys reading my blog. Time for a quick brag that my blogs have received over a thousand visits in the past two weeks. Admittedly some of those have been achieved by dubious means but at least people have been clicking on adverts. By dubious, I mean putting adverts up suggesting that people would find hard-core photographs of a sexual nature when instead they find everything is upright and of good moral standing.

Continuing my series of bus photos, here's another one. This time taken with my S1 IS zoom compact. I think I bought this camera from Best Buy before I found Best Buy wasn't very economical.
The big mistake on this is that it was underexposed as aperture priority on the S1 IS seems to top out at 1 second. It's nice and sharp though at f8. 

You've read about my comments about the different cameras available and my quest for ever more depth of field and have probably wondered why anybody would want a camera that only had part of the photo in focus. That's pretty much what I wonder too. There are lots of people that think it's "artistic" but quite candidly, I disagree. When everybody wants to head down the route that art is about mucking about with perfectly good scenes then we are doomed. Art is not about farting around. It is about seeing something nice and recording it.

I dislike intensely the over-Photoshopped garbage that poses as photography these days. It is about as close to photography as a grain of flour is to a cake. Originally there was a good photo there but it has been truly bastardized. The worst I ever saw was the winning entry in South Carolina State Fair. It was a car-wash that had been Photoshopped to have elephants in the car-wash and drying themselves with large towels. That was utterly the most miserable picture I had ever seen. That should never even have made it to the 1st round of judging.

So where do all these photo test leave my opinions? I'd still like to try the Nikon 1 system. I'd like to get my hands on some of the Panasonic and Fuji mirror less cameras too. Realizing that I do need manual focus which would be harder to do on many mirrorless cameras does quench my enthusiasm a shade. Having said that, as I've said before, there is no rush to get mirrorless. It's still a very immature market. It's a market that could boom or that could flop.

Today also I had an interchange with the Chamber over inclusion in the next handbook and on their website. I've come to the conclusion that I'd probably be better just dropping out of all that and just becoming an ordinary member. The chance of getting business for a photography business where each of the 21 potential clients has to pay about $1,000 minimum in order to achieve minimum wage as a photographer is somewhat slimmer than the chance of truth coming from a politician's mouth.

I keep thinking yes, I could do this or that but no - photography never will work as a business. I'd be better enjoying it instead. That's pretty much what I ended up saying, that I don't want to be included in the listings.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Spend no money

I am done with spending money advertising that I do photography. It's something that might rake in a few pennies from time to time so while I am always available for almost anything that involves money changing hands in my favor, I'm not actually advertising this fact. I'm not even keeping up with a business license as it's so easy for a company or individual to hire me as casual labor. Again, the chance of this happening is so laughably slim that it's just not worth even advertising. Aside from that, I'm currently trying to broaden my horizons both geographically and educationally.

Today was quite an interesting day. I met some nice people at work who were apparently Mennonites from the same community that I visited earlier in the year in Blackville (see www.britinthe.us for more on that). On that trip, I chatted with the Mennonites and found them to be a very friendly, straightforward people who led a fairly austere life but who did use modern technologies that suited them as long as they did not detract from their community identity. I might go to see them again. The food was excellent in their canteen.


When I was with the Mennonites, I did not photograph them out of sheer respect for them. Although it's very interesting to see photographs of different people, it's hard for most viewers to imagine how invasive photography is for them. Imagine being so different that everybody was pointing at you and saying how different you were, stopping you in stores and in the street to ask about your appearance and taking photos of you. This is what it is like for the Mennonites, the Amish, the Hutterites and so on.  It really does represent to them an invasion of their privacy. I am not a great people photographer anyway. I much prefer not to photograph people. I have done it and I'm pretty awful at it because it's not really my interest. Photography of the things that represent them are fine though - cart wheels, oxen and ploughs, their products, the products of their labor etc. Anything inanimate should be fine and of course, that's the kind of thing I love to photograph anyway.


What's so special about this bus? It's one I bought for $2 in a clearance sale. It had originally been $20 and had gone to 50% off ($10) and 75% off ($2.50) before going to $2. It just reminds me of a very similar bus I was given as a child of about 3 or 4 by my parents. That bus was bright red. This is a funky color but it reminds me of my parents and of the happy times I had as a very young child. This was indeed a cellphone photo. There's no real need for me to pull out a digital SLR just to take a photograph of a toy bus, is there?


Well, just for fun, here's a photo of the same bus taken with my digital SLR, handheld on 1600 ISO. The colors look better. The image loses a little sharpness toward the back of the bus due to the depth of field being less. Now if I'd bothered to put up a tripod, the picture might be even better. 


I must have been a little bored tonight. I dragged out a tripod, put the camera on it, set the aperture to f32 so that everything from here to Iehova would be in focus with 100 ISO and gave it a 20 second exposure. 

All of the photos have been done under florescent lighting and have had light photo editing. It's easy to see here that the cellphone photo is not the best of the three. The 1600 ISO handheld photo is surprisingly good. The last one is hands down the sharpest although at web size, they are all usable. Those with my DSLR look better which is entirely to be expected.

I'm still not a fan of flashes though. I would still rather photograph using natural light sources or conventional lighting.






Sunday, October 13, 2013

Nil illegitimi carborundum

I edited both of my photography websites today. Perhaps I should say both my photography blogs. After axing the one domain name yesterday because it cost $6 more than the current domain name, I finally got around to changing the new name to work with the blog and set the old one onto a redirect. I remember I had one old domain that I'd finished with that I had redirecting to the Russian KGB website for a bit of a laugh. I won't do that this time though. Actually one of the fun things to do if I were a hacker would be to take control of the MI6 domain and direct that straight to the KGB website. I mean, really, all the top MI5 and MI6 spies all seemed to be double agents, controlled by the KGB chairman, for quite a few years.

Needless to say, I changed a few things around. Now my one blog is more of a photo website. That's this blog. The other is purely travel. I had it originally that this site would be more for experimental photography and the other was my main photo blog. I switched around. Originally this site wasn't going to have much posted in the blog section but I decided to change that. Of course, I am free to change my mind whenever it suits me because this is all personal website/blog stuff. There's no real requirement upon me to update either on a regular basis. I seem to be updating this one a bit more though.

Since I decided to dump photography as a business, my life has been a lot lighter and more pleasant. Running or trying to get clients for a business that nobody wants is very stressful. Honestly, you tell me where I might find clients for a photography business! It's retarded thinking that there will be any. Before I started the photography business, my attitude had more or less been that photography was a hobby that paid rarely. I won't go into how or why my opinion got corrupted, suffice to say that my views have returned to my original views that photography is a fine hobby that occasionally might pay.

My regret is that I bit on the line of bullshit that photography as a business would pay and so I ended up paying through the nose for stuff that I really, honestly don't need. I bought a pile of studio stuff that I finally managed to sell off the other day. I doubt I got more than 10% of what I paid but given that I'd been trying to shift that garbage since May, I consider myself very lucky to have shifted it. I'd given myself until December to get shot of it. After December I'd have just considered it worthless and tossed it into the garbage skip. Selling the rest is not going to be quite as frustrating as the rest is small enough to sell on Amazon or Ebay and send off in the post. The studio stuff was harder because it was just so bulky. I had light stands that had both reduced in price since I bought them and which had free shipping then and now. Who's going to pay $15 for a light stand (and shipping on top) that they can get new for $30 and shipped to their house? If I was to match that then I'd be talking at least $15 for shipping which would have meant I'd have possibly got $5 for the light stand and then had to pay about $10 in fees to sell the damned thing. It had to go locally or go in the garbage skip.

As for the rest, at the moment as I have sold the bulky studio garbage, I'm in no great rush to sell anything else however it would be nice to reduce what I have down to a more sensible amount. As I have said before, I really like the Nikon 1 system because it's so small. I don't think I could go as small as the Pentax Q system as the sensors are just far too small. I checked the size of the Panasonic/Olympus micro 4:3 system today. The 14-42 lens is exactly the same size or only a shade shorter than the 18-55 kit lens that I had with my XT. That's no real advantage. Similarly, the body of the Pentax is unlikely to be much smaller than my XT (if I removed the battery grip). I am left with two options. Option one is to sell the Canon flashes as they're probably going to depreciate further and just to keep the cameras and lenses. Option two is to sell everything and re-equip with one of the smaller systems.

The downsides of the smaller systems is that they're all relatively new so there's not much in the way of secondhand gear available yet. The other downside (before I changed my Mac OSX from Leopard to Snow Leopard) was that I couldn't open newer file formats but that's been resolved now. The upside is clearly size. When the camera has built-in image stabilization, the advantage is clearly in favor of the body as lenses will be so much cheaper. It's less effective on longer lenses compared to lenses that have stabilisation.

So, at the moment I'm still in no-man's land. I could stay with some of my existing stuff and just sell off the stuff I don't use or I could go the other way and sell everything and get stuff I want to use. It's a tough choice. I know my camera is paid for and has little to no resale value - it's that old!

Saturday, October 12, 2013

Stepping forward into the future

A week or two back, I picked out a new domain name. My old domain name of britishphotography.us was fine and dandy but it was a bit verbose. It was a lot to key in. Thus I have a new, shorter domain name - britphoto.us which should be much easier to remember. There's a hidden advantage too - the registrar wanted $10.99 to renew the old domain but only $3.99 for the new domain. I'm up for saving $6 and making life easier into the bargain.

Originally, British Photography was the name I had for my photography business. It was suggested that I made my Britishness my unique selling point for photography. This would have worked had anybody actually been hiring photographers. I don't know whether it's the Lexington/Columbia SC area that's particularly appalling for photographers but I rather suspect not. I rather suspect that it's all over for photography as a profession or a business.

I have a feeling that since the Chicago Sun Times sacked all its photographers and gave its reporters iPhones and instruction on how to use the cameras, the end is in sight for all professional photography. It's not just that but the fact that all the cheap instore photography studios went bust. It's also the stories I keep hearing from other photographers. One who was a photographer for 25 years just went bankrupt, others are seeing dramatic decreases in income. Many are thinking of exit strategies from the business. Even 20 years ago, it wasn't rosy. One of my friends was a really good photographer but spent his life swinging between periods of affluence and longer periods dependent upon welfare. It wasn't even brilliant when many of the "names" were growing photographers. They got to where they are not through skill but through staying power and bulling their way through situations.

So, now I have dumped the business, I am free once more to enjoy photography. How I arrived at having one shall remain forever shrouded in the mists. That's not really as important as the present.

Right now I'm giving some very serious thought to selling all my camera stuff so that I can go for one of the new smaller camera formats. My favorite is currently the Nikon 1 system. I really like the size and its capabilities. I'm really not keen on the poor quality of the 10 - 30 lens which in areas of high contrast displays really appalling fringing. The Fuji X system is appealing as it's very like my Fed 2 which was a copy of the Leica II. These days I am much more into smaller and lighter things. When I was in Key West, my XT and 17-35 Tamron lens were a bit bulky and heavy when walking in 90% humidity and 100 degrees Fahrenheit. I'd really like a much more compact system based around a single camera rather than two. A professional needs two bodies. An amateur only needs one. A professional needs many lenses with duplicates just in case. An amateur needs no duplication.

As I'm thinking, I'm selling the stuff I don't need, ready to get the stuff I do but without making the mistakes of the first time around when I bought everything new. I'll never make that mistake again. Thus, I'm in no stunning hurry to get myself a new system. I'm selling off all the bits of the old system that will be hard to sell or which still have depreciation left in them. One of the side benefits of a smaller system is increased depth of field.

  • With a full frame 35mm camera, F8 at 3 feet would give 0.07 feet of depth
  • With an APSC digital camera, F8 at 3 feet would give 0.26 feet of depth
  • With a CX format digital camera , F8 at 3 feet would give 0.47 feet of depth

Notice how the depth increases with each smaller sensor format. The focal length used was for the equivalent of 88mm for each sensor size. That was just my somewhat arbitrary choice based on the fact I do all my high-speed imaging with an 18-55 lens set on 55mm.

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Added a new page

Today I decided to expand my photo blog. Rather than having just high-speed and technical photography, I decided to put all of the kinds of photography that I love to do on my own, on the site. It will be covered slowly because I am doing various other things as well.


This is the current addition. Tabletop photography can be fun. This is supposed to be French even though the tablecloth is a plastic tablecloth that came from Walmart. The cutting board came from Walmart. The knife came from one of the dollar shops. The glass, bread and cheese came from Walmart and the dye used to color the water came from Party City. The lamp used to illuminate the scene is a standard gooseneck desk lamp with a 40w incandescent bulb - both from Walmart.

I have a few LED bulbs but sadly had my first casualty among my LED bulbs the other day. The photo below was taken with my cellphone. This was an LED bulb that I bought on ebay from China for about $8 back when LED bulbs were hot new stuff. It lay in a drawer for a few years because it was just too blue to be useful for most things. Then the bulb over my stairs blew. That was a florescent bulb and the base exploded. Fortunately I managed to remove it with a pair of pliers. Thus, for about 6 - 8 months I have had this bulb as my stairwell illumination. Yesterday I looked because I thought the light was a bit dim and found a lot of the LEDs had failed. Fortunately as I don't need a lot of illumination on my stairwell, I don't need to replace it yet. This was poor though for a light alleged to last 10,000 hours plus. Clearly I will have to try a different form of stairwell illumination. Perhaps a different brand of LED bulb.


For photography, LED lighting is wonderful. It emits no heat and is very directional and easy to control. I thoroughly recommend LED for all forms of photography with one caveat - make sure the color balance is good. My current desk lamp is LED also and tends to be a shade on the green side.

Saturday, October 5, 2013

The long view

While there's a lot to like about the Nikon 1 system, there are distinct advantages in doing something totally different.

I'm looking at this rash of smaller mirrorless cameras and foresee a problem in that the market is not yet mature. Most of these cameras popped up in around 2012. That's quite a short life for a technology lifecycle. I am not 100% certain that going over to the Nikon 1 system though I would like to, is going to be the right move. I'm looking back at my Canon gear and thinking differently; that it's gear that I currently own and that it works. Now there's stuff that I just don't want nor have any particular use for in that kit such as the flashes. The bodies have already depreciated to zero. The lenses probably won't depreciate any further. The flashes probably will so they're best gone.

The staying power of such new systems is debateable. I remember Nikon's Pronea system, Pentax's 110 SLR system, various disk cameras, Zenith's PK mount camera system etc. There are a lot of systems that came in with a great flurry and great fanfare that quickly vanished beneath the waves. Rollei's 35mm SLR system was one such thing. After everybody had bought the camera and a lens, the system vanished and nobody could buy extra lenses. Nikon produced the F3AF in the 1970s and produced two AF lenses for it. Most people had the kit AF lens but when the system vanished, the other AF lens became rarer than hen's teeth. My fear is buying into a wonderful but soon to be obsolete system. Does anybody remember 8 track tape units? How about Betamax? All very promising things that early adopters bought into but which ultimately went the way of the Dodo. I don't want to throw money into something that's not going to be around for much longer.

Thus, it's probably better to trim what I have down to what I will actually use and forgetting about different systems. For sheer portability, I cannot fault my phone camera as it is always with me!

How to blow up the word

This picture was taken in poor lighting with my cellphone camera. It's really not bad. The photo below was taken in the early morning when the red lights were very visible and then given an aged 1970s look. I see no problems with that for online use. At 5 megapixels, it would print pretty well to A4 or 8.5x11.

The 1970s view

That's in defense of cellphones. Now, I'm wandering off my beaten track or rather my intended point of view. Going for lightweight and compactness, it would be possible to use a simple Canon XT and a single lens. It's not quite as compact as I would like. On the other hand, as I already own these, there's no cost involved in obtaining them.

Will I change to a different system? Maybe - maybe not. I think the mirrorless market needs to mature for a few years. It could mature or it could end up like Olympus. Now, Olympus had a really quite excellent film SLR system in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s they just quit making their OM system. In about 2003, Olympus produced their four-thirds system and tried to popularise it. Only Panasonic leapt on the bandwagon and the system never gained mass appeal. Now, Olympus makes only one flavor of DSLR and they have produced yet another new system which again has limited appeal. The odds on Olympus dropping their DSLR system and going for their new system for a while before quitting that too or maybe just quitting the new system are quite high, based on past performance. I would not be surprised if Nikon's 1 system flopped either. Thus, I think it's now a waiting game rather than a buying game.

One of the things I dislike about current SLR systems is the almost complete lack of good landscape lenses. Nobody seems to make anything much in the way of prime lenses any more. Certainly zooms are far better than they used to be but they're never going to be as good or as lightweight as a couple of nice prime lenses.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

The real costs

As this is not a professional website, I am not afraid to show cellphone images.  This is just a simple image and shows you everything that I am about with photography and life in general. Value and economy. This is my electricity bill for September 2011. My bills are rarely more than $28 in the summer and $40 in the winter.
How on Earth do I get my bills so low? Simple - I turn everything off when it's not in use. The only things left powered constantly are the fridge, microwave and my router. My lighting is a mixture of compact florescent and LED lighting. I turn a lamp off when I leave the room. I don't have a TV guzzling electricity on standby. 

How about the rest of my expenses? They're low too. No food gets thrown out because it has gone off because it's eaten before it goes off. 

I am applying this philosophy to my camera gear. I had a ton of expensive professional gear that I just didn't want or need. That's all being sold off and replaced by cameras that I will use. The problem with professional grade equipment is that it's expensive and you're afraid of damaging it so it rarely leaves the storage unit. Out go the professional stuff that I used for my book on high-speed imaging and in comes a lower-cost, smaller size system. Instead of two cameras I will have just one. Instead of several lenses, just one or two. 

As I have said before - something that is used is more valuable than something expensive that sits unused in a cupboard. This is what happens with expensive gear. It is kept locked away. I want to get out and take photos. I don't want to be afraid of using my equipment. So, was getting sold (as I wrote this) and and will soon be replaced by a secondhand Nikon 1 system which will comprise initially of one body and one lens. 

There are major advantages with both macro photography and high-speed photography with a smaller sensor because of the depth of field. It's much easier to get a really good depth and consequently a wider aperture and more light on the subject. 

Just because I am switching now to a small system does not mean that I won't ever have a larger system again. I feel at the moment that the smaller format is the way forward. I don't forsee another Pronea debacle this time around.

I had a professional photography business at one time. I'd been persuaded to get a business license for a business that I really didn't think would ever make a profit. I reckoned on possibly making a few dollars here and there as I did when I was in Britain. I knew one fellow in Britain who spent a quarter of his life making money from photography and three quarters supported by welfare. I started it and tried advertising and got a couple of bites here and there from which I did get money. It was annoying having to keep completing tax forms online every month, filing zero just about every month. There was no real benefit to that.  Certainly it was possible to claim portions of my electricity and my internet bill as expenses - which they genuinely were as well as Yellow Page advertising etc. The fact is though that advertising a worthless business like photography just ended up costing me money rather than getting money and the deductions didn't cover everything. As I have said before, it's better just to suck it up and pay taxes than to mess about trying to get blood out of a stone.

The money I make from photography is twofold. First, people click on adverts on my blogs which makes me a few cents each time. Secondly, people buy the books I have written. Those are the sole ways in which photography produces any income. The big bonus with those methods is that I don't need a business license. I just file the income from them as personal income. I don't sell anything - other people do my selling for me. No business license is needed - life is simple.

This is the kicker - for websites and books, it doesn't matter what camera is used. The pictures have to look decent (not brilliant) and that is all. They are most emphatically not there to be demonstrations of photographic excellence. They are there to illustrate a point and that is all. For the vast majority of images, it doesn't even matter if a cellphone is used for the photo - especially on a website. Look at the illustration of my electric bill. Does it matter that it was shot with a cellphone? No - it does not.

My prediction is that as photography becomes increasingly utilitarian, the more expensive equipment will decline. Already I see a great decline in photography as a hobby. Gone are the days of articles on how to DIY so many aspects. Now it is a case of articles on which items to buy. I did see somebody making so-called flash modifiers out of foamboard and straws but it looked like a lot of work for no real gain.

I am in complete agreement with one fellow whose website I forget that stated that he considered that the professional photographer would decline so much that a professional photographer was more of an anomaly than anything else. I know many local photographers and absolutely none of them make more than a small part of their income from photography. One who was a professional wedding photographer went bankrupt, one who has a booth in a mall has another job to finance her hobby. Another does photo restoration rather than photography and another couple work retail to finance their hobby businesses.

Given that photography is a hobby or at best a hobby business, it makes sense to think small in terms of costs. Just like I keep my electricity bill small, it makes sense to keep equipment to a minimum. A gadget to do this or that will soon run away with money. As an experiment when I went to Key West, I took one body and one lens. I quickly regretted the bulk of the body and the lens which is where my desire for the Nikon 1 series started. I found it no hardship to be there with one lens and one body and no flash either.

While these could probably stand a little straightening, it does illustrate the strength of the photography one can do with a single lens. In this instance, it was an 8 megapixel Canon XT and a Tamron 17-35 non stabilized lens. While the Nikon 1 probably costs more than the XT and Tamron 17-35 do now, the advantage is portability. Taking the XT and one lens out is a major mission. I can simply throw a Nikon 1 in my pocket. Big difference. Of course if one were to get the Nikon 1 J1 then that plus two lenses can be had for $250 secondhand.

The crux of saving money is to get secondhand. I allowed myself to be persuaded to buy everything new and hence I have dropped a ton of money on it all. The XT for example was about $800 new. Now it's worth possibly $80 secondhand. It's just so bulky though that I put it up for sale. Hang the loss of money, I want something smaller and more practical. I don't want to have to carry a huge bulk of stuff around. I am not a slave to my equipment. It is also noticeable that the more fun I am having, the better my pictures look. Remembering the happiest time I had with a camera, it was when I was in my parents garden in Wales, photographing insects and flowers with my Nikon 995 zoom compact that I'd paid a massive $600 for. It was only 3 megapixels and the photos were phenomenal and they still are.

As I reclaim photography as a hobby rather than as a business, I seem to be gaining only upsides - lower costs, less stress, better camera, more depth of field etc. Finally, it doesn't matter what camera is used to take a photo - the successful photo is the one that sells. The highest grossing photo of the 1990s was one taken with a disposable camera that was in all the newspapers.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

A pregnant pause

I'm in the midst of selling all my camera gear. There are several very good reasons for this:

  1. The Canon stuff I have is bulky
  2. The cameras are 8 megapixel and later cameras have more megapixels.
  3. The flashes are something I never use.
  4. The studio gear is something I never use since I quit professional photography.
  5. It all represents a lot of money tied up in something I never use and worst of all, if I leave it tied up, it will continue to depreciate rapidly.
So it's time to sell everything which is exactly what I'm doing.

I am most certainly NOT giving up on photography. I am instead changing to a system that is better suited to what I do. I am changing to the Nikon 1 system.

The Nikon 1 system has a 2.7 times crop factor as opposed to the 1.6 times crop factor of the Canon XT and 30D. That matters because of the depth of field issue. I like lots of depth of field in my photos. I can't abide those photos with shallow depth of field. I can always blur things out later. I cannot increase depth of field after taking the photo.

With High-Speed photography, depth of field is everything. If you remember reading my books then you will remember that I shoot at F8 and 3 feet distance with a 50mm lens and that gives me just
3.79 inches depth of field (according to a depth of field calculator). That calculation is far too generous and I reckon on maybe an inch of depth of field. Going to a 2.7 times crop factor increases that depth to 17 inches. Basically everything from here to Kansas will be in focus. That allows me in turn to use a wider aperture and thus to get a better exposure.

I was just reading about the Nikon J1 and even saw one going secondhand with the 10 - 30 and 30 - 110 lenses (equivalent in 35mm to 27mm - 81mm and 81mm to 297mm) which is pretty much the range I cover with my existing equipment. The big bonus is that the whole lot was going secondhand for less than I would get for selling just some of my current equipment.

So, it looks like a winning situation. It does not preclude me from getting another bigger camera later either and the other bonus is that I will be able to use my existing Nikon lenses. Canon is nice but I feel I want to return to the Nikon fold. One of the great advantages of the 1 system is that because it uses the smaller CX format, it's also physically smaller. A J1 camera and lens will fit into a jacket pocket. That's much more useful. When I went on holiday last time, I took my XT and a 17-35 lens. I had some fantastic photos from it but it was bulky and heavy and got in the way a little.

Image quality - this depends on which review site you view. Some show really appalling images and others show great images. It all depends on the quality of the review site, I guess.

The kicker for me is how small the camera is. I don't need a huge camera. I like good image quality and it looks like this camera will provide it.