Black Friday scams

Did anybody fall for the black Friday scams? I surely didn't. Had I not had to work on Black Friday, I would not have ventured out of the house. As far as I am concerned, the "bargains" are most certainly not anything like what I would call a bargain. From what I have seen of Black Friday sales, they are the dog-eared last remnants end of line stock that the shops want to dump on the public. The price has been hiked for the previous month and then dropped sufficiently to look as though it's a genuine reduction. In fact they're still making a massive profit while pawning off end of line junk that's no good to anybody.

I stayed home until 2pm and then drove into work. It took longer than normal to get there (which I had allowed for). There were queues galore on the roads. People were shopping with $100 bills in their fists, falling for every damn scam imaginable.

On previous Black Fridays I have been out to see if I could find any "bargains". There were none that I ever saw. Gasoline, food, essentials like soap and toothpaste were all the same price as normal. Clothing was the same price as normal. It was only the garbage like electronic gizmos and that kind of junk that was allegedly cheaper. Electronic garbage I can almost live without. Additional electronic garbage I can certainly live without. I was impressed by the Google Chromebooks. I was almost as impressed by those as I am by my Mac. The electronics I use as solely my computer, my phone and my camera. I use no other electronics. I have no TV, no HiFi, no fancy radios, no CBs. I live a simple life.

I look at all the new cameras and really I see no great advantage over what I have already. My 8mp cameras will print to 20x30. Who needs more than 11x14 anyway? Who really prints to more than 8.5x11 which is the size of most common printers. Sure - I have one that will print to 13x19 but I have never ever printed to more than 8.5x11. It's just too expensive. That is without even considering the fact that most homes are too small to display more than a few 10x8 prints. In South Carolina, I would not wish to hang anything on my walls for fear of bugs using the backs as a nice hiding place. A black widow bite or a brown recluse bite would surely spoil my day.

I don't know why people fall continually for the fake bargains. They do so all the time. It seems ludicrous but that is what retailers are counting on. They're counting on people wanting the fantasy rather than the necessity.

This piece of garbage was something I bought for a laugh in one Black Friday sale. It was $10 and I had some idea that I would do something with it. In the end I didn't and ended up giving it to a friend. I regret wasting the $10 on it. That was the last thing I ever bought on Black Friday. I will never again buy anything on Black Friday.

Today I was reading about all the other stuff that went on during the Black Friday sales - shopkeepers trampled to death by crowds, fights between shoppers over what is essentially just garbage and even gunfights. I don't think Black Friday is anything more than a cynical confidence trick by retailers. I regard it as one of the few times when going armed is in order. Given that there are so many killings, murders and shootings at stores - particularly Walmart - it pays to be prepared. 

No turkeys today

Today everybody in America is probably gobbling turkey from Walmart and sloshing back cheap box wine (also from Walmart). They're taking cock-eyed photos with cheap cameras and cellphones also purchased from Walmart. After all that, they're going to head off to the Walmart photo center to get prints or CDs made of their film/digital images.

Stop! Think of the poor workers at Walmart. Forced to work at any hour of the day or night, sometimes with back-to-back shifts that mean they leave their house for a night shift and return after having completed 16 hours non-stop on the job. There are those also that are given such miserably short shifts that it's not really worth their while to come to work. By the time the minimum wage employees have been called in to do two hours work (this happens more often than you would imagine) and spent 30 minutes driving to and from work and probably about $7 on fuel for the privilege, their take will be 2 hours at $7.25 an hour or in reality they're working for $3 per hour. In my local Walmart there is a cashier whose dental benefits (if indeed Walmart offers benefits) don't seem to cover much. That cashier has not a single tooth nor any dentures. It is an appalling situation that the cashier cannot afford dentures with which to eat properly. It is a damning indictment of Walmart's low-wage culture.

I need to go shopping for groceries. I refuse to do it on Thanksgiving because of the way corporations like Walmart treat their workers. Whenever possible I get my fruit and veggies from a farmer's market. Aside from being bigger and fresher, they're cheaper.

I am not a devout vegetarian. I do not worship solely the vegetable though I really do enjoy a good beanburger. To celebrate the American Thanksgiving, I raise a glass. I am but an adopted US citizen having been a US citizen for just over a year.

Let all our tomorrows be brighter than our yesterdays. I know my todays are brighter than my yesterdays. I passed through strife and sorrow, hurt and anger, grief and pain to get where I am now. For that, I am thankful. I am thankful that I never threw in the towel and always remained the person I always was.

Kodak is dead

Tonight we are in mourning for Kodak. A true and trusted friend whom we all knew from birth and our fathers and forefathers also knew. Like Agfa, Kodak has now ceased to exist as a camera and film producing company. This is a great loss to the world.

Agfa were responsible for producing the filmstock to make the highly acclaimed Münchhausen film in 1943. Agfa was also the first company to perish under the onslaught of digital imaging. The film-making division was bought out and became Agfa-Photo which went bankrupt after a year.

Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection after digital imaging made inroads into their market share in 2012. This year they announced they were emerging from bankruptcy as a printing only business. I really don't see that as going to last as most people now never print their pictures, preferring to display them online or on screens.

Oddly enough, Kodak should have been the most able to survive the introduction of digital imaging because it was Kodak who in 1975 developed the first digital camera. They sat on it for fear of it destroying their traditional printing and camera business. They failed to recognise that somebody else could develop the same thing and failed to develop a viable strategy around it. It's all very strange.

So, we have the ongoing death of Kodak continuing. The company will probably remain in its death throes for a few years before slipping unloved into the depths of the receiver's hands. It's a company that needs to be shot and put out of its misery.

I used Kodak film and Kodak cameras. Indeed, my first camera was a Kodak Instamatic 126 given to me by my late aunty and my late grandmother. I loved it and took many photos with it - few of which survive today. I used Kodak film for many years until I discovered Konica had better colors for print film and Agfa was better for reversal film. I stuck with Ilford for black and white film aside from Kodak's infra-red black and white film.

I will miss Kodak in my mind though I purchase no Kodak products nor have purchased any Kodak products for years. We all miss the Kodachrome series of films that we never used. It's strange that we all have fond memories and a feeling of loss for something we haven't used in a decade or more.

All I can say is RIP Kodak.

Quoting Steve Irwin, Danger, danger, danger.

One of the things Steve Irwin was often heard to say was "Danger, danger, danger". I had been asked several times in the past why I didn't have a Facebook page. I didn't really see the point and still don't. In fact I see now more reason why NOT to have a facebook page. One of the ladies I know has a cellphone and showed Facebook off to me. I took a couple of screenshots just to illustrate the danger that Facebook poses.

The individual whose identity I have obscured as best as possible has a severe security problem because Facebook is displaying their geographical position. The other individual whose identity I have obscured has a telephone number on display. This is truly horrible. Imagine the danger from stalkers, perverts, rapists, muggers, robbers, burglars etc. All they need is the slightest scrap of information and you're an instant victim.

Why don't I have a Facebook page? Pretty much because I value my privacy. I know there are some rather evil individuals out there that I have encountered in the past that I just don't want stalking me. Sure - they definitely read every blog posting I put up, looking for information to use against me but as these blogs are topic oriented, they're out of luck. I also include no location information - not even my registrations show my physical location.

I used to use Foursquare with friends, posting where I was located before I realised that it was an extremely stupid thing to do. Friends can simply call me to ask where I am. The whole world does not need to know where I am at any point in time. For the same reason that I say Facebook is dangerous, so too is Foursquare. Twitter has the potential to be troublesome also for exactly the same reason. This is why it is important to turn off location information and to ensure that postings are pretty generic.

So, why all this mention in a photography blog? Simply because the villains out there have no idea what the value of equipment is and no idea that photography does not actually make any money whatsoever. To them, the sound of photography sounds like expensive equipment and rich people. Many ladies like photography as a way of expressing artistic freedom and creativity, just like I do. None of us wants to be a victim either so why put yourself out there as a potential victim? I say the same thing about these personal photos that people put up on websites. I would never do such a thing myself. It just invites trouble.

My erstwhile companion Yorrich (Hamlet) is my normal headshot for websites where a headshot is obligatory. Frequently Yorrich wears sunglasses and a hat and is always side-lit and in monochrome. That way to anybody enforcing standards, it looks as if it could be a real person but Yorrich will always remain a styrofoam head. Generally, I try to avoid having to post headshots. I hate the idea that somebody might look at my stuff online and be able to identify me. It's not as though I post anything untoward - I just try to get the most privacy I can. My experience of the world is that 95% of the people range from very nice to OK. The remaining 5% just drips with evil. It's that 5% that drip with evil that make up the Geoffrey Dahamers and Robert Bandos of this world. It would be a shame to make their lives easier by showing them what I look like, where I go, where I live, what I eat, when I go to places etc. Even though it's possible to use lethal force in self defense, I don't want to have to go to all the explaining involved nor to all the work scrubbing the blood off the floor. I'd rather avoid the situation entirely by retaining as much anonymity as I'm allowed in this overly open world where everybody can find anything online. I don't want to end up like the proverbial victim lying dead in an alleyway strangled with her own pantyhose.

A not very tragic accident

In a not very tragic accident yesterday evening when I was working with my phone on my blog, I managed to delete yesterday's entry. I'm not too bothered about it though. All I was commenting on was that I had just had a huge number of site hits via a link on a Romanian website. I'd also been rather surprised to have a larger than background number of hits from one of those hateful photo forum thingies. From what I remember of those things (sadly I used to waste too much time on them a few years ago) they're largely comprised of people either buttering each other up or castigating each other. Photography seemed to take second place to gratuitous wittering. I believe I voiced a concern that being linked from a photo forum might impact negatively on my website's web rankings as a form of link farming.

I heard a comment somewhere and I'm not sure where. Apparently somebody had died and left a load of photographs behind. Family went through the photographs and found a lot of the artsy-fartsy stuff that were of no worth nor interest and too few photographs of the things that matter - such as places where they lived, photos of family etc. That raised the question of what is a photographer? Is a photographer somebody that does artsy-fartsy stuff or somebody that documents life?

The online photo forums just seem to be full of photo gangsters rather than anything else. Quite obnoxious places and exactly why I gave up frequenting them. On the other hand, they do give the lunatics a place to frequent and keeps them off the streets. So, back to real photography and the interesting comment. This is pretty much the question one should always ask - is this photo worth taking?

There are whole books on how to photograph baubles in a desktop studio setting. Feininger was very dismissive of such people in his book on photography. Such photographs are a complete waste of time and effort, to be honest. Nobody wants them. Nobody wants to see them. The only people that might want photographs of baubles are the companies that sell them. For the most part they have the lighting etc all worked out and a minimum wage employee working the camera for their website.

There's a huge myth about photography that blows photography up into something more than a hobby or an interest. It seems to make out that it's a way to riches whereas in fact it's not. Heck, I passed yet another photography studio yesterday with a big "Lease for sale" sign outside it. To be honest, I have not yet seen a "professional photographer" that has not been struggling horribly and on the verge of bankruptcy. They all seem to believe that have a product to sell and certainly photography is a skill but like knitting, it's not a salable skill. Who gets paid to knit when I can go to Walmart and buy a pair of machine-knitted socks for $1.99?

To the average family, a photograph taken by wedging a cellphone or compact camera onto a chair and leaping into the frame after pressing the self-timer just works. They don't need a "professional" photograph of them. The photograph is for themselves and their family. Nobody cares about getting ultimate quality - they just want something recognisable.

For me, I enjoy my photography. I go out. I take photographs of what I see. I sometimes try to make the best images possible. I have fun. My books on High-Speed photography are me sharing the skills on how to take high-speed images with modest equipment. Certainly I could have spent thousands on a microflash, thousands more on just the right camera etc. It wasn't important. It was actually doing it that was the important thing. Not just doing it but gaining the joy from doing it. It is like infra-red film - no conceivable use to anybody but a scientist but incredible fun to play with.

To my mind, there's too much baloney attached to photography. Not just the money aspect which is utter tripe. Nobody makes money from photography - it's purely a hobby. Some manage to make money although I am sure their approach is less than honest. I recall an advert voiced over the speaker in a store offering $10 portraits. I heard that and wondered if it was worth investigating so out of sheer boredom I did and found that it was $10 to sit in the chair. Then $15 processing fee then $10 for a print or to have the photo emailed. The $10 just covered sitting in the chair while a button was pressed. See what I mean - totally dishonest and a total scam. That was the in-store photographer in one of the department stores in Lexington, SC. I am not surprised that they had a shady operator like that working there. I don't have a high regard for chain stores.

Photography is not a job. It is not a career. It is fun and should be enjoyed. There's no point in competing for the best photograph of a leaf or a bauble. Nobody cares about "photo quality" all people care about is getting something recognisable. What I do is to photograph interesting things, places I have been and family. Other than that, it's photographing things to sell on ebay etc. I don't care one jot about competing for the highest photo quality. It just seems to be somewhat anal.

Against plastic

For those that didn't yet work it out, the answer to yesterday's question was the top photo was taken with my cellphone, the middle photo was taken with an elderly zoom compact and the bottom one with a digital SLR. The zoom compact used to be sharper but was sent back to Canon for a new sensor after it failed with a repair that was a free repair (even after it was several years old). It came back with a color cast and not that sharp. It's not important though. I might end up donating that camera and getting myself something nicer.

I was looking at my Canon lenses today and noticed they are noticeably bulkier than my old Nikon manual focus lenses. My old Nikon lenses were metal with very little plastic used in their construction. I have never ever been a fan of plastic in things. It's far too flimsy and doesn't last at all. I have heard people saying that it withstands knocks better but I have yet to see plastic not break when it gets a bump. I remember a take of somebody that dropped a big glass Leica lens down a cliff. He got to the bottom and there was a small dent in the filter ring that he straightened later with a toffee-hammer. Otherwise the lens was unharmed. A similar plastic lens would have been trashed. I reckon the bulk of the cheap and nasty plastic lenses is because plastic is so flimsy they need far more of it to make the lens reasonably stable. Give me metal and glass any day. In terms of weight, there's not really much weight penalty.

Another thing about manual focus lenses is that they all had a depth of field scale on them. Those scales worked well and even had an infra-red focussing mark. I miss those on the modern AF lenses. There have been times when I have had to guess the correct focus point and pray I got the aperture right. The following photo is a classic example.

I had to focus mid-way between the reflection and the text then choose an appropriate aperture. If I had let the camera do the focussing then either the text or the flag would have been in focus rather than both. A classic example of why autofocus is such a diabolical load of garbage. Everybody is convinced by autofocus which is fine if all you want is bland, mediocre photos.

The one bright step toward the future is the Nikon DF that apparently works with manual focus lenses. It lacks a proper manual focusing screen which I hope some enterprising Chinese fellow will start making and marketing on ebay. Installed that should make photographer rather fun again.

As far as commercial photography is concerned. What the heck is that? As far as I know the successful professional photographer is an anomaly. Anybody that claims otherwise is a complete liar. There are no photography clients out there, hunting for work. Pretty much anybody will give you $5 for a portrait if you badger them enough. They'll probably pay you just to shut you up and might even sit for a portrait and act pleased but put it in the linen closet until you visit. They won't really want your prints - they just don't want to be badgered and figure buying you off is the quickest way to shutting you up. The last I heard, most companies found somebody within their organisation to take the photos they needed then fixed problems with photoshop - all in-house.

I laugh when I see books on "how to be a successful photographer" because they are all written by failed businessmen. They always start off by describing how to get the small fry - the non-paying clients that just want to get on with their lives without having to tell you no but who agree to photography as long as it's free or low cost - just to get shot of you. Then suddenly the books go into multi-million dollar model shoots with teams of make-up artists as though one led straight to the other. This is a complete load of fantasy. I have not yet seen a photography business book that does not totally leave out the important middle part.

What we have is an industry peddling plastic cameras, plastic lenses to pretentious individuals that think they're God's gift instead of realising they annoy everybody. Then we have the fantasy of people that think they're going to make money from photography. What a load of garbage!

Yesterday I posted 3 sample images from a cellphone, a zoom compact and a digital SLR. At the resolution shown, they all looked very similar. The exposures were different as were the colors but otherwise the images were similar. Both the superzoom and the cellphone had similar detail, beaten only on a larger image by the digital SLR. None of the images were of stunning quality but then I have rarely seen anything that stunning that hasn't been photoshopped to death. It's like the days of film where everything got airbrushed to death.

We live in a very false world and the plastic lenses with their bulk and cheap-plasticness epitomises this. Whatever happened to the real world where men landed on the moon armed only with slide-rules and people used Hasselblad 6x6 film cameras? We now have spray and pray wedding photographers where a monkey in a suit turns up, takes 3,000 photographs and then spends weeks working out which half-dozen photographs are worth giving to the bride and groom.

Three photos

Below are three photographs I took today, casually out of the window of my car. One was taken with a cellphone. One was taken with a Canon XT digital SLR with the 18-55 kit lens another was taken with my Nexus 4 cellphone and the last was taken with an 8 year old Canon S1 IS compact. I really haven't bothered with photo editing them. I converted one from RAW to JPEG but the others were straight JPEG. Aside from some color differences, there seems little at this resolution to choose between them.

I am not even going to say which image is which. Look at them and tell me that given some image editing (more than I ever do) you could actually tell the difference between the images. I am going to say that you cannot clearly identify which is which.

Your homework for the night is to work out which image is which. Contact is as normal via  @valkyrie_2. I am going to bet that at a glance you just cannot tell the difference between the images. This is of course my whole point.

People are buying phones with cameras and using them for everything because the cameras are so damned good. When I see the quality available from cellphones I question many things about the worth of digital compacts and even digital SLRs. What's the first camera you pick up to do ebay with? Your cellphone. What's the first camera on the scene of an accident - a cellphone. This is why we have so many articles about the death of newspaper photography. The reporters can get out there with their iPhones and do a better job and for far less than the photographers used to do.

I predict that in a few years, cellphones will be the choice of the amateur photographer as well as the casual snapper. I further predict that digital SLRs will become very expensive premium items used solely by the very few surviving professional photographers. The professional photographer will become something of an anomaly.

The great digital scam

Over the years, digital photography has evolved as the biggest scam in creation. When Voyager 1 & 2 were launched, their cameras recorded about 640,000 pixels. Did it really take from 1977 until 2013 to develop 41 megapixel cameras? That's an increase in pixelage of a shade over 1 megapixel a year. That's ludicrously slow development!

Spy satellites have been around since the 1960s with very high resolution digital imaging cameras. I just don't believe for one instant that camera manufacturers have not had the capability to produce 16, 20 and 40 megapixel cameras until just recently. The technology has existed for decades. The research and development needed has already been done.

What the camera manufacturers have done is to milk the public mercilessly, producing cameras very slightly better than the one before. 2 megapixels is so close to 3 megapixels that there's very little difference. The same between 3 and 4 and between 4 and 5 and between 6 and 8. As I recall, megapixels came out in the following order...
640k, 1, 1.3, 2, 3,4,5,6,8,10, 14, 16, 18, 20, 24, 36
Each of those steps is infinitesimally small and looks good on paper until you see the real comparisons which are truly pathetic.
3 megapixels is 2048 x 1536
4 megapixels is 2448 x 1632
Notice the truly infinitesimally small change between 3 and 4 megapixels. It's just 400 pixels in width by 98 in height. If that isn't a scam, I don't know what is.
Looking at later cameras we have the 8 to 10 megapixel "leap"
8 megapixels is 3456 x 2304
10 megapixels is 3648 x 2736
It looks bigger but in reality really isn't noticeably. It's just 192 pixels width extra and 432 pixels in height extra.

Really, seriously it has taken camera companies 10 years since the introduction of digital camera to the public to drip a few measly extra pixels each year onto the market? Of course, those few insignificant pixels come at a premium price. Digital cameras started at thousands of dollars and have only now begun to reach the level of cost of a film camera. They're not quite there yet though. In the 1990s I could buy a darned good film SLR for about $200. The cheapest digital SLR is $450. Even allowing for inflation, it's still over priced. And of course the public has been scammed and milked mercilessly.

How many people bought a digital SLR when they first came out and then found the new one was a whopping megapixel extra so dug deep into their pocket and bought the next extra megapixel without realising they weren't buying anything much extra? Sure - they part-funded it by selling their old camera for a fraction of what they paid but they still funded the camera mafia. I would not be surprised to discover that all the camera mafia families were in cahoots and had a cartel in operation since they all released the same megapixel cameras at around the same times.

I just looked at a photo printing chart. As many of my regular readers will know, I opted out of the megapixel bullshit when I bought my first digital SLR which is 8 megapixels. Thus far, I still see no reason at all to "upgrade". The chart states that my 8 megapixels will produce an excellent 20x30 inch print. I have absolutely no intention of printing to greater than 11 x 14 and the vast majority of my images remain in digital and not printed form.

I notice that most camera manufacturers seem to have stopped at about 14 megapixels though they do still try to scam people with ever more megapixels. I don't think anybody is biting any more. I think that as dumb as the general public can be, they have woken up to the fact that they don't need any more megapixels. Most people only ever had 6x4 prints and for those, a 1.3 megapixel camera was more than adequate. They got suckered into buying new digital compacts every year at about $400 a go. I reckon most people got milked of about $5k before they finally realised they didn't need more megapixels. Myself, I had two standards - my compacts were 3 megapixels and my SLRs were 8 megapixels. I have noticed no lack from either standard and continue to operate both standards and will do until the cameras fail. Thus far my sole failure has been my Nikon 3100 which died on me in 2010.

Now let's look at sensor size. I hear various arguments about sensor sizes but as far as I am concerned, they are all a load of baloney. The point of a camera is to take an acceptable photograph. That is the sole purpose of a camera. All cameras now take better photos than was ever possible with film at every iso level. That's from your cellphone upwards.

The major sensor sizes seem to range from very small (cellphone size), small (compact and Pentax Q), half-frame (APS-C) and full frame (24mm x 36mm). The sole difference is that at higher ISO, the larger the sensor, the lower the digital noise. Having said that, the noise levels are pretty low and well managed anyway.

The big downside of digital is the lenses. They have become massive things compared to film lenses. They're a lot lighter. All I can assume there is that they're making them cheaply out of plastic whereas the old lenses were made carefully out of metal and glass. To ensure solidity, they have to put more of the flimsier material into the construction. What we have basically are cheap-ass lenses with a premium price attached. That's without mentioning the inferior optics. The bonus for the camera mafia is that because the image is digital, nobody needs to know how much processing goes into it. Remember the Hubble space telescope that was fitted with a half-assed mirror? They had to write software to repair the damage to each image by the bad mirror. The same kind of thing goes on with digital cameras. The lenses are produced to be as cheap as possible with the flaws all fixed in camera unbeknownst to the user by the camera. This is particularly so with the cameras that don't have optical viewfinders. The camera mafia is continuing to palm people off with sub-standard cameras and optics, bodged to look good with software. The camera mafia is raking in the money and laughing their asses off at the fools that buy the garbage.

Are there any honest camera manufacturers out there that aren't in the camera cartel? I really don't know - I hear so much baloney from corporate sources that it's hard to tell up from down. As far as I can tell, they're a bunch of monkeys.

Can you tell the difference

There was a very interesting article that had three photographs. One was taken with a top-notch camera; one was taken with a middle-range camera and one was taken with a decent compact camera. At the size shown there was no visible difference between the photographs. Let me repeat that, there was no visible difference between the photographs. The top notch camera cost $5,000, the middle-range cost about $1,500 and the compact was $200 apparently.

Where does that leave all the braggards? Simply put - it leaves them eating their own words. My biggest gripe about people who brag about their cameras is that they never ever show a photograph that can't be taken with care and an ordinary compact camera. One of my pet hates is people that brag about the price of their camera gear. I am familiar with a book by a photographer named Feininger. In that book he states:

So, we have gadget freaks that existed in 1977 when the book was written ("The Complete Photographer"). They still collect expensive equipment, rarely if ever use it and ponce about like prima donnas because they have expensive equipment that nobody else can afford. They're also too afraid to use their equipment. I have often said, a cheap camera that gets used is worth a million expensive cameras that stay in the closet.

I have a lot of respect for what Feininger has to say about photography. He wrote one of the few books on photography that I consider worth reading and I found my copy in a secondhand shop in Ohio a few years ago. Don't ask why I was in Ohio - it was a trip I endured rather than enjoyed. I did take a few photos when I was there but would rather forget the trip. Ohio is a bit like that - dark skies, miserable people and generally pretty unhappy. I've been to Ohio on several occasions and can't honestly recommend the place. It's strange what little gems one can turn up in such places though. It's reminiscent of Samson's riddle in Judges 14:14.

Going back to the question as to whether anybody could tell the difference - of course nobody could tell the difference at web size. Nothing online is likely to be more than 1024x768 pixels. If it's bigger then it takes too darned long to download. The internet connection I use is fast. It's 3mbps download according to a test I just ran and a bit slower for upload. I'm using DSL and largely I have no problem with it. I never was really that bothered about ultimate internet speed having started with 14k dial-up. The whole point is though that many people have slower internet connections than this. Anybody using 2G or 3G mobile connections will be very much in the slow lane. Web developers have to remember this so largely don't use huge images. A good rule of thumb used to be that no webpage including images should be over 100k. That might have changed these days a little as developers work toward the majority who have faster connections although with slower 2G and 3G connections, there may be a return to smaller sites.

So, we have a scenario where people take photographs and publish them in online albums. Hardly anybody examines the images to any great size. Nobody is that interested - they're just "pitchers" to most people. The only person that cares is the photographer. Nobody else does. This is largely why nobody ever looks at photos online. I could say "this is a great photo" and I might get 2 or 3 people to view it. Those that view will be viewing more because they want to come up with a self-justifying argument as to why that photo is so awful and why theirs is so great. This doesn't change the fact that photos are never seen full-size online nor does it change the fact that as photos are meant to be printed, taking them to huge resolution is pointless because very few ever are printed.

Today I saw a 10" digital photo frame going for $69 in Walmart. It's probably a load better than the 6x4 photo frame that I gave away about 6 months ago. The fact is though that the resolution is low enough that 1.3 megapixel camera is more than sufficient to take a photo to be displayed on those photo frames. Nobody is going to give the photos displayed more than a cursory glance either.

Therefore, if photos are not going to be printed but displayed instead online at low resolution or on digital picture displays at low resolution, what one earth is the point in spending so much money on cameras that can take photographs in detail that nobody else is ever going to see? I really see no reason why most photographers throw money at digital SLRs, Interchangeable Lens Compacts etc. The might just as well get a digital superzoom instead. At the image sizes used, it doesn't matter how much digital noise is in the photographs. Nobody will ever see the noise at that size reproduction. Thus, there is no real difference for 99.9% of users.

We are now back at Feininger's comment that there are a lot of gadgeteers in photography. I'm going to say that probably 90% of camera gear sold goes to gadgeteers. I have met a few of these people in the past. I do remember the statements about still testing lenses. That rings a bell. The only time one needs to test a lens is if you suspect there's a flaw. The best testing device I have ever encountered is a brick wall. A straight-on photo of a brick wall will show up just about every form of distortion or softness known to man. That's one photograph taken one time only.

The vast majority of amateur photographers fully believe that they are in the 0.1% of users that desperately need to be able to print to huge sizes. More than likely they also believe they have the ability to make money from their cameras despite the fact they never will. There's just so much baloney in photography.

• The average photographer will make money from photography <--- BALONEY!!!!
• The average photographer needs the best gear to make money <--- BALONEY!!!!
• Only the best gear allows you to make money  <--- BALONEY!!!!
• It's only time before your talents are discovered <--- BALONEY!!!!
• Only big images will sell <--- BALONEY!!!!
• A big image is needed for online publication <--- BALONEY!!!!

For all intents and purposes, it doesn't matter which cameras were used for the 3 images. I could do a 3-image sequence and nobody would be able to tell the difference between my cellphone, elderly zoom compact or my elderly DSLR.

I have looked at smaller cameras than my DSLR and really do wonder if for my purposes a simple zoom compact wouldn't do perfectly adequately.

Issues

I looked at my Twitter account today. I'm very, very tempted to go over to using True Twit. I get so many people following me then mentioning me in their messages and that all pops up on my phone. I check to find what they're doing and it's always spam. I seem to spend half my Twitter time just reporting spammers.

Now, why am I talking about Twitter on a photography blog? Well, it's not because I can put photos from my cellphone via Twitter into my blog. It's because I use my Twitter account to update and as a form of contact for those that wish to contact me. I have absolutely no other form of contact on my blog/website.

At one time I had a contact form on my website and that got thoroughly abused with no actual, genuine enquiries or contact. I had a phone number on my website that attracted so many junk calls that I had to change my phone number. I had an email address on the site at one time. That got bombarded with so much spam and no genuine contact that I had to abandon the email account. Now I have Twitter on my account as a form of contact. I am again getting bombarded with absolute garbage. As this is a family oriented site, I can't honestly describe what I feel about the garbage I receive. Suffice to say, I don't think a whole lot of it.

What do I do in order to avoid garbage? Must I open a Facebook account to let people contact me that way? On the other hand, from previous experience of Facebook, I'd rather not. There are a few obnoxious characters there that I just don't want to interact with. Similarly, I'd rather not have them see my interactions with others. If they view my blogsite, that's something I can't stop. On the other hand, each time somebody does view the site, some of the adverts carried do pay per page view rather than per advertising click. I like those adverts. They make me the most money.

So, whatever electronic means of communication I give gets abused by people advertising, thinking they're going to get a sale. I was never this aggressive when I was advertising photography as a money-spinner. I tried various things and found they all had exactly the same effect on other people as they did on me. I thus never tried cold calling etc. I did not want to antagonise anybody. It wasn't as though I could actually see any market for photography. It's the age-old problem - how do you sell to a market that does not exist? As I've said before, selling photography is like selling bacon outside a Synagogue.

In these days of the Internet, people with websites can simply hotlink images from other people's websites or simply copy and paste images taken from other sites or from royalty-free websites. Although a lot of it is 100% illegal, copying a photo taken by a photographer in country A and using it in books etc in country B has absolutely no repercussions as the photographer is unlikely to be rich enough to pursue for copyright infringement nor are the rewards likely to be sufficient to offset the cost and inconvenience of pursuing the case. My personal opinion is that the Internet is more like the bad side of town than anything else. I rather suspect photography is also widely seen as being one of the occupations of the people from the bad side of town and that photographers are viewed as generally dishonest and vaguely roguish without the redeeming features of the fictional romance that surrounds rogues.

And now an actual photo from the bad side of town. There's a rock cafe on the bad side of town where I went and took some photos a couple of years back.

Where is photography going?

Back in the days of old or at least from the 1970s to the 1990s, when I was at the beginning of my photography interest, the commonly available formats were:

• 35mm - used by many
• 126 - same film as 35mm but 24x24 instead of 24x36 frame size
• 120/220 - roll film
• 127 - roll film 
• 110 - cartridge film

In the 1990s 126 and 127 pretty much died out, being replaced by APS and disc film. Those flourished for a few years then by 1995 they were totally gone. Since then, digital imaging has come to the fore and nobody really thinks about film any more. Film has one glaring advantage over digital and that is in latitude. Film has much greater latitude than digital. Digital is good but film can capture a greater range of light and dark tones which even RAW digital cannot really capture.

Rolling on forward to the 2000s and we ended up with 3 main digital formats and a few oddball variations.

• Medium format digital
• 35mm format digital
• Compact digital

Medium format sensors are not truly the same size as 120/220 film frames; they are smaller. They're still bigger than full sized 35mm sensors (36mm x 24mm) but they're still nowhere near the size of even 645 format film (60mm x 45mm)

35mm format sensors aren't really the same size as 35mm film as a general rule. They're smaller normally although there are increasingly 24x36 sensors available.

Compact digital sensors are very small indeed. There's a wide range of sizes.

What we have at the moment is an increasing variety of sensor sizes. This makes the end user's choice very difficult indeed because none of us really wants to invest in a camera - particularly if it's a system camera is it's likely to become legacy before very long as that makes the system components hard to find and hard to replace. Complicating that fact are the number of smaller format system cameras being released.

At the moment although the photography industry has always been trying new things since inception it seems a good idea to wait before buying into any new system. In the 1990s APS film came out and camera systems were designed around it. Now the film is not manufactured anymore and neither are the cameras. In fact the cameras only seemed to be around for a very few years before they vanished.

I am seeing is a general convergence. Digital 35mm formats are getting ever more megapixels and beginning to match the megapixels of medium format cameras. From what I saw recently, most digital medium format cameras are between 16 and 40 megapixels with a few at 60 megapixels and just one at 80 megapixels.

Given that perfectionists say that 300dpi is what you should aim for with digital prints, Nikon's 36 megapixel camera would produce an image 7360 pixels by 4912. This works out at a final print size of 24 inches by 16. Of course, it really doesn't work like that and I have never noticed a difference at 150dpi or 48 inches by 32. Once an image is printed to that size, it's possible to get by with less dpi because it's so big one has to step back to view it. This 35mm camera is pretty much on a par with medium format.

My prediction is that unless more megapixels are packed into medium format cameras, medium format will vanish from the camera scene fairly soon. Already the prices for medium format cameras prove how little market there is for medium format digital equipment.

As the quality and capacity of the smaller cameras improves, people seem to be moving away from the larger cameras. Does this perhaps mean that the introduction of the smaller format interchangeable lens cameras was right? Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, as everybody with a cellphone now has a cellphone with a camera, are system cameras going to be that desired any more? More than that, as fewer and fewer people opt for prints, will the reason for people desiring high megapixel counts vanish? Already I see photographers porting iPads around to display their work without realising that the savvy potential client will realise that iPads are really quite low resolution and are thus very misleading in terms of final print quality - especially when prints are required.

The big question I'm beginning to ask is that since so much is now digitally displayed, are larger megapixel images really needed any more? If all people are going to do is to display on screens rather than on paper, I doubt they are. Even commercial images displayed on giant illuminated hoardings are not that high resolution. The highest I have seen is 10,000 pixels per square meter. A 20 megapixel camera would need 200 square meters of hoarding to display every pixel taken. I have yet to see a hoarding of greater than 30 square meters. At 10,000 pixels per square meter, a 3 megapixel camera would be adequate!

Perhaps we all need to stop and think for a moment where photography is headed. Are we going to get ever higher resolution displays or is there any point to higher resolution displays? Are we going to print anything ever again? I hear lots of people claiming to print to silly sizes but I don't have any prints on my walls. I don't know many people who do either. I had some framed prints but gave them away because I didn't want critters hiding behind them - this is the deep South, after all.

Are we headed away from physical prints and toward total digitisation? If so then are we also heading toward a new Dark Ages from when no records survive? If everything is digital then we are 100% dependent upon electricity and electricity is incredibly fragile. Where are we headed?

Damn! 18-250!!

Damn! Look at this humungous lens! Sigma came out with a lens that goes from 18 - 250mm. That's absolutely flaming ridiculous! I only just saw this thing and all I can say is "wow". If I ever put this on one of my cameras, I doubt I would ever take it off


With lenses like that around, it does make me question whether we actually need digital SLRs any more. Are they a relic of the past now? Aside from the extreme long lenses that seem to no longer be produced, I don't generally see anybody using anything over 500mm these days. The lens above (which should be clickable), placed on any camera would seem to me to negate the need for any other lens. It will cover (on standard APSC camera) the range of 28mm to about 400mm. That would cover everything from indoor events to close-ups of the goalkeeper's bootlaces at a football match!

What I am wondering is with lenses like this whether the concept of a digital SLR is now dead. If that lens was fused to a body permanently as a superzoom compact, things could be really interesting. In fact, I just had a look at a superzoom compact just to see what the quality was like. I think the smaller sensor caused a few issues but I was quite pleasantly surprised by the image quality obtained from it.

One of the other things that interests me is Sony's new idea of a lens with a built-in sensor that couples with a cellphone. That idea has many advantages. The cost of a sensor is negligible and it could in fact be cheaper to produce a lens with a built-in sensor that couples to a cellphone than to do all the machining to make a bayonet mount and all the wired connections between a camera body and lens.

I think things are definitely looking interesting - again, this should be a clickable image. I have a feeling things could develop further in the camera world. Already we are seeing mirrorless SLR style cameras as well as compacts with the reach of a huge lens but in a tiny package. I'm definitely watching developments with interest.

As my regular readers will know, I have seriously considered selling my digital SLR system in favor of a smaller system. I am not 100% sure that would be the right move for me at the moment however. I am extremely interested though in all the latest camera developments.

Nikon uses foreign labor to answer questions

I had three questions for Nikon about their new DF camera. They could not answer a single one of them. They were:

• Would the camera work with manual focus lenses (in my case, Nikon AIS lenses)?
• Would the camera work with a PC socket flash (it has PC sockets on it) that might be high voltage?
• Are different focussing screens available.

Nikon's answer was...

Thank you for contacting Nikon Customer Support, I'll be happy to assist you.

We cannot provide information on third party products. You will need to contact the manufacturer of the product for information.

Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns, below I have attached a link with contact information:

Clearly Nikon needs to start employing people that read, write and comprehend English. No wonder the world is slipping down into the economic cesspool.

Judging also from Nikon's enthusiasm for answering my questions, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I shall imitate Nikon and show the same lack of enthusiasm for prospective customers by not buying their products. I work in sales and this is possibly the worst sales enquiry response I have had. Mind, I don't find people take email enquiries all that seriously. If people aren't taking them seriously then just don't bother with them. Just take the damn contact form off your website, Nikon.

All the nonsense

It really is entertaining to read the photography forums. There's so much bullshit on them being paraded as opinion and truth. One of the most popular bits of nonsense fought over on most forums is something like the larger the image sensor on a camera, the lower the digital image noise on the images at higher ISOs. Well, possibly but we are now at such high resolution on the sensors that the noise produced at higher ISOs (some of which were unheard of in film days) is so infinitesimally small that it is of absolutely no consequence.

The vast majority of the people on digital camera discussion forums are not amateur photographers or hobbyist photographers. They probably call themselves that but they are not. What they are is consumerists. They are not photographers - sure they might take photographs but they are not photographers. They buy the latest equipment and parade it either online or in person for bragging rights. Then they sell it in order to "upgrade" or for some pathetic excuse they contrive as an excuse to get the latest version. Why they have to give a reason or an excuse, God alone knows.

I still use 8 megapixel digital SLRs. They're 7 years out of date now. They work. They work very well. The only thing they won't do is video and who really cares about video anyway? I have far more fun with GIF than video. Video, GIF and still photography are three entirely different skillsets. Video is the skill I have the least patience for nor interest in. GIF is pure fun and stills are pure fun.

• Video needs steady panning, steady zooming, strict noise control and careful planning. If the panning is not perfectly even, the zooming is jerky or the camera zooms in then out or pans one way then the other, it runs a severe risk of inducing motion nausea into the audience.
• Still images merely require the photographer to keep the camera still while the photograph is being taken.
• GIF images require the photographer to keep the camera still for a couple of seconds while taking several photos one after the other in continuous mode. Usually this is about 5 photos. On my camera I can take 3 photos a second which means I have to hold still for about 3 seconds which isn't at all hard.

I have - as I said - no real interest in video and don't really expect to gain any either. I shall not be upgrading to a newer camera within the foreseeable future. There's just no need as video is about the only thing I don't have.

Going back to the baloney about noise and image sizes, the question is what one is comparing this mythical noise to and when the noise becomes unacceptable. I used to use Ilford black and white films - Pan F, FP4 and HP5. I also tried Kodak TMax3200 for color I generally used Agfa color slide film and Konica 100. I did try Konica 3200. Above 5x7 with any of those films and grain began to become apparent. With a 3 megapixel digital I can print to 10x8 without any apparent degradation. With 8 megapixels I can print to 16 x 24 without grain becoming apparent.

It becomes a question more of what we are trying to achieve. Are we simply trying to match film - if so then we have surpassed what film can do. We have surpassed what film can do, many times over and on many grounds. In the past, the largest prints were 10x8 and more commonly 5x7 as the large size. 6x4 became the de-facto standard print though in years past, the 6x4 was big with the standard lab print being 3.5 x 4.5. Now people want ever bigger prints. Many demand a 6x4 as a standard size and 8.5x11 or A4 as their big print. Needless to say, some want even bigger and now printers are commonly available for amateurs that will print to 13 x 19 or A3. Prints are now available on demand to much larger sizes and the consumerists are demanding that their cameras be able to produce images that size and bigger in order that they can crop and still get a huge print.

I have a problem with this kind of thing. People's expectations are out of control. How many 10 x 8 prints are hung on the average wall? Not too many. How many 16 x 24 prints are on the average wall? The excuse I hear for people wanting these ridiculously high megapixel count cameras is because they might want a huge print to sell or to use. The chances of selling photographs is very slim. So slim it's not worthy of adult consideration. The chance of wanting to print something to a ridiculous size is pretty slim - about as slim as finding a lab that will do it. Where is the sense in it all? Large sensors that will print flawlessly to very large sizes have several issues.

• The cameras are ridiculously expensive
• The prints are ridiculously expensive
• There's nowhere to hang such huge prints.
• The file sizes are massive and require massive amounts of storage.
• Massive files require more massive computing power to handle them.

There is absolutely no advantage to having huge sensors and ridiculous megapixel counts at vast cost just for the possibility of a hint of a slight chance that you might get 50 cents back on a $100 print. Nobody buys photography any more! Similarly, being able to hang a huge print on a wall is a ludicrous aspiration as few of us live in houses big enough to hang a huge print.

In the old days, prints were put carefully into family albums. Now the trend is to show them online with a maximum resolution of 1024x768 as anything larger would take forever to download. There's also a trend toward digital displays which are inherently lower resolution. This makes a complete nonsense of the desire for ever larger sensors.

It should come as no surprise to discover that I think little of the kind of person that will spend hours pouring over an internet forum, posting every 5 minutes into some dreary discussion as to why equipment x is so much better than equipment y.  The chances are that if they own the equipment it is never going to come out to be used - they're forever going to be "testing" it.

Interesting developments

A while back I set a challenge for Nikon 1 system owners. That challenge was to photograph a dark scene. One person chose a night landscape and somebody else chose the night sky. Both complained that they could not actually see using the LCD focussing screen. That, of course, was the whole point - to be able to take a decent photo without being able to use the screen. The results were mixed. The night sky photo was crisp and good looking. The landscape was a bit rough. The experiment was a complete success. With a suitable viewfinder clipped onto the hotshoe mount, it should be possible to aim the camera and then to turn the focus ring manually in order to focus. There are no insurmountable issues. The interesting thing was how difficult both people claimed it was as they had clearly never had manual focus only cameras that took film. It seems that modern technology is reducing people's skill set.

In other news, Nikon released their DF camera. It's the camera I would have wanted back in 2006 when I bought my Canon XT. It takes manual focus lenses, it works with manual focus lenses. It even has a PC socket. The only questions are whether it has a decent split-screen fresnel ring focussing screen and whether the PC socket is safe for older flashes. This seems to be the camera that would be perfect for me as it would revive my old AIS Nikkor lenses (if they're still any good after a decade of not being used). The old lenses were all primes which don't seem to be a forte of digital systems.

Zeiss markets lenses for digital cameras totally devoid of autofocus and with purely the standard bayonet mounts and manual focussing. There is no doubt that Zeiss lenses like Leica lenses are the best in the world. Most Zeiss lenses are over $1,200 whereas the AF equivalent made my Canon are maybe $200. That tells you that either Zeiss is that good or they think their name is. I would opt for the former.

So, where now? Well, I looked at the weather map and see it's around the time to photograph autumn leaves. I'm hoping that all the leaves have not fallen. If they have then I shall be sad. If not then I shall have a glorious time photographing them. Needless to say I probably have a bit of a road trip ahead of me. I don't want to go too far though. I don't want to have to spend a night in some little hotel somewhere. I think the last time I did that was probably about 18 months ago. Hotels are OK but I prefer my own bed. If I had a van then I could set up a bed in the back and use it as a camper for trips like this. I don't though. I almost went for a panel van but couldn't find one that I really liked and thus ended up with my SUV. I have a friend that goes everywhere in a Ford Transit - he uses it for hauling stuff around, for camping in and for just about everything. I have no doubt that my SUV is more stylish and more comfortable. I do wonder if I would have been better with a van though.

Having had a car though, in the past, I definitely would never buy a car again. I much prefer the higher driving position of my SUV. But since I haven't put a photo in for a few posts, here's one of a clone of the General Lee. I gather in the Dukes of Hazzard, there was not just one General Lee but a multitude.

This was taken at the Irmo Okra Strut a few years ago. That was notable for there being a rather unpleasant stallkeeper that yelled at me for walking around with a camera. Thinking about it, it would have been good to ask her why she was being so ugly. Some people are just weird and neither her nor her stall were of enough merit to even bother photographing. The Okra Strut was interesting but so mildly that it was not worth bothering visiting again. It had no soul.

Making the photo blog more fun

One of the things I try to do is to make my photo blog more fun. Sure - I have pages where you can see photos. I put photos in the blog feed etc. Today though it's time to address an important issue. That issue is Twitter and Foursquare.

Twitter is fine - it's a micro-blogging service that allows me to post updates from wherever I am via a mobile phone. There comes a point though where it's possible to share too much, as this fellow points out. It is, of course, obvious not to post where you are at all times in case somebody realises you're not home and knows that it's safe to break in and rob you.

Foursquare is the major headache. It's really a geolocation service that tells everybody and their dog where you are located. That is, of course, a major way of telling the villains of this world that you're not home. It's like a 20 foot wide billboard beside the road that says "Hello, house 235 on road ABC is unoccupied as the owner is at establishment X, 200 miles away".  In other words, it's a please burgle me announcement.

This all leads to one of my main thrusts which is internet safety. Years ago, we used to hear "never put your real name, real address or photos online". There is and was a good reason for that. The good reasons are still:

• So that nothing you post online can be traced back to you. The internet remembers everything forever. It's worse than a vindictive partner for remembering all the bad things and forgetting the good. That university photo of the guy wearing pantyhose, a skirt and a bra could come back to haunt him when he's working as a corporate banker. 
• So that nobody can identify who you are to deal with any perceived insult personally. Not everybody lives in America and has access to firearms they can use to defend themselves against internet psychopaths. It's a good idea not to run the risk of that. Personally, even though I live in America where I can legally shoot a burglar/assailant dead, I would rather avoid having to because I'm sure there's a ton of paperwork I'd have to complete afterwards. 
• So that nobody can work out where you live and set out to burgle your house when you publish your location online via Foursquare.

As a photographer, it would be perceived by most villains that you have expensive gear. They don't realise that the value of gear plummets like a lead brick if it's electronic. On the other hand, a villain reckons he's done a good day's work if his takings will buy him a couple of beers.

So, the problem is how to make the blog more fun and more interactive without adding to the dangers. Really and truly although I think my identity is reasonably well concealed, I do know there are probably pathways to find my real name, real identity and real locations. Thus, sadly, I have decided to take Foursquare out of my Twitter feed. I really quite enjoyed making my blog more interactive but the guy is right. It's all fun and games until the idiots come calling though as one of my friends said when they saw my place - any burglar would be more likely to leave a donation than to take anything away. I really don't have that much.

As somebody said - burglars are more likely to leave me a donation than anything else. Most people have a sofa and a TV in their living room. I have a folding table and chairs and a storage box that doubles as a bench for the rare occasion anybody visits. It is definitely a bachelor pad. Now you probably know why I have adsense on my blog - every click gets me one or two cents. Every time those clicks add up to $100 I get a payment. I get payments once every couple of years and it's always very welcome.

How did I arrive at this level of poverty? Probably partly by following extremely bad business advice on starting to run a photography business. What I should have done was instead of trying to run a photography business, I should have run away from the idea. It was more a case of I love photography, I love taking photos that please me. They please some others but not everybody. I ended up spending a ton on photography crap that didn't get me an income. In the end I sold most of it though the expensive camera that cost $1,000 is now worth maybe $30 on a good day on ebay. Of course, in the process I proved that nobody is likely to hire a photographer and found that most of the other photographers are going bankrupt or getting the vast majority of their income from things other than photography.

Now I concentrate solely on photography for my own pleasure. I don't generally get out much to do much in the way of photography these days due to low funds. It doesn't help that my workplace is closing in about 8 weeks which leads to interesting problems. On the other hand, that could end up propelling me to a more lucrative position elsewhere.

Am I unhappy? No - not really - I have a roof over my head, food in my belly and a mattress to sleep on (if not a bed). I have a job at the moment. I don't have all the fancy things that most people desire. I keep my bills low. My latest electricity bill was a shade over $28 for the month. I am comfortable even though I'm not living in luxury. On the other hand - I own everything that I have and have no debts. I think being debt free is far more important than anything else in these dark, depressing economic times.

Why do you do that?

Why do you do that? Why do you enjoy photography? What is it about photography that attracts you?

For me, I like to record the things I have seen; not just to show other people but so that I can revisit the memories and the experiences years later. Certainly it's possible to do this with video but it's so much quicker to review still photos than to review videos as videos have to be viewed sequentially. There is a cross between still and video that's becoming ever more popular and that's animated photographs where 5 - 10 photographs are combined in a single GIF image. These are a heck of a lot of fun to view but require steady camera work. This is perhaps where a stabilised lens comes in very handy.

Clearly all the images have to be taken with the same focus point and the same angle etc but they are so much fun to watch. This is perhaps a new thing to play with although GIFs have been around for many years.

Some people like to compete with others to produce the "best" image they can. Personally, while I have entered competitions, I win only rarely. In fact I really haven't bothered much with competitions in ages. I usually find they require me to head out, find a subject and photograph it rather than for me to submit a photo that I already have that fits the bill. With the requirement these days to submit the exif with the photo when I've entered competitions I usually have to edit the exif to make it look as though the photograph was recent and taken with a current camera model. It's not really my cup of tea. I take photographs for my own enjoyment.

One of the things I dislike the most is gratuitous abuse. If I post a photo on a forum (this is what drove me away from forums and clubs) then I will get a chorus of people willing to say how awful they think a photograph is, how awful I am for taking such a photograph, how dreadful my camera and my lens must be, how I should sell it all and give up photography because I'm so bad at it etc. Very few people have the intelligence to come up with anything sensible to say. My mother always said that they'd say things like that because they were jealous. I think it's more that there are a lot of people who're quite miserable in this life and they seek to reduce their misery in comparison by making others feel more miserable.

I seek to shield myself from the misery-makers of this world. I surround myself with happy people whenever I can and don't belong to clubs or societies if at all possible as they tend to attract people who need others around them in order to climb their social ladders. There are quite a few that join societies and clubs not because they have any real interest in the club or society but because they like to play at being managers of the club or society.

Every day I hear arguments as to why one camera is better than another, another sensor is better than another, another sensor size is better than another but rarely do I see photographs that are better because of the camera or the sensor. It doesn't matter what camera is used to photograph most subjects. Most have already been photographed many times before anyway. What we're doing is not new and unique. Technology has not allowed us to do something miraculous that we could not do before. We could quite happily work around things with our older equipment, even though it might have taken a little longer.

I see new things that can be done with newer digital cameras and my question is simply - "why". Movies can be made with digital SLRs but unless they're going to be professional productions, it leaves me wondering why. On the other hand, any digital camera's video output is going to be far better than the junk that used to be paraded as video cameras.