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!

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