An interesting day out

Yesterday I went to a state park. I carried my Olympus camera. It was so nice in comparison to my old Canon camera and I’ll tell you why.

1. The entire camera is light and around my neck weighed almost nothing with the kit lens attached.
2. I had a longer lens (equivalent to 80-300mm) in a jacket pocket that was also very light and not really noticeable. 
3. I had a spare memory card and spare battery in my inside pocket.
4. I did not need a camera bag.

Now with my old Canon stuff, I’d have needed a protective bag because everything was just so big and bulky not to mention heavy. Just look at the difference in size.

The Olympus is on the left and the Canon on the right - both are with kit lenses. I can tell you right now which I prefer to carry and that is of course why I sold my Canon equipment. The only thing I regret about selling my Canon equipment is that I waited so long and lost so much money doing it.

This is one of the photos I took yesterday. Look at the color and resolution. Look at the exquisite detail and yet this is just an out of camera JPEG. I don’t have the ability right now to handle RAW images. 

Now let’s look at costs. New, I paid probably $800 for the XT and $100 for the lens for a total of $900. It’s now worth maybe $50 combined. That’s at least 95% depreciation. My Olympus I paid $75 for the camera and $50 for the lens. I can’t imagine that depreciating. New the body would have been $600 and I’m not sure what the lens would have been. I didn’t make the mistake this time - I bought secondhand.

When I was out, I saw one fellow with a massive Hassleblad digital. I didn’t talk to him as I knew I was well out of his league in his opinion. I did speak to another photographer who was using a Canon professional camera and who was all in favor of megapixels. I asked what he used those excessive megapixels for and all he said was he did a lot of editing. Well, editing is fine but what the heck did he need those megapixels for. I never got an answer to that. He didn’t seem to think too much of my reckoning anything over 8 megapixels is really overkill for most people. I guess he’d swallowed the camera marketing baloney hook, line and sinker.

All I can say is I am very happy with my cheap secondhand Olympus kit. It does everything I want with the push of a single button. Now if I were to go back to high-speed photography, I probably could still do that with my Olympus. I’d just have to focus manually. No problem!

How much is enough?

Canon and Nikon have done it again. They’ve produced a completely new range of cameras that none of their existing lenses will fit without some kind of adaptor. This is utterly ridiculous! Both have made a move from cameras with mirrors to mirrorless cameras, which they could quite easily have done without designing a whole new system. I just dn’t get the whole new system thing - that just seems to me an excuse to try to sell more lenses.

Meanwhile Nikon quietly discontinued their small 1 system. That was a huge blow if not a slap in the face to everybody that has bought a 1 system camera. Those things were small and neat though way overpriced.

The big marketing spiel is all about “full frame” in other words 24x36mm sensors. I’m afraid sensor size is about as overblown as megapixels now. Cameras are available with well past 20 megapixels yet there is no earthly reason to have that many pixels. I currently have two cameras - an old Canon XT that currently lacks a lens. I’ll probably get an 18-55 at some point. That’s 8 megapixels. I still see no earthly reason why 8 megapixels is not more than adequate for most people. In fact there is no camera produced in the last 10 years that is not perfectly adequate. My other camera is an old Olympus PM1 with the standard lens. That produces 20 megapixel images which are way in advance of what I actually need.

Ever more megapixels means ever more storage needed. It does not mean any improvement in image quality. It just means the images are bigger, harder to store and that’s it. Bigger sensors just mean more money spent on the camera and that’s it. It does not improve image quality. Image quality is 100% in the hands of the photographer.

These new systems are utterly meaningless. They’re all about Canon and Nikon milking the hobbyists for all they can get. The hobbyists are the people without the intelligence to see that they’re being milked.

This photograph was taken with a Canon XT and a table lamp. It’s not 100% the look I was aiming at but it’s not bad. The image quality is excellent. That’s 8 megapixels on a 1.6 crop sensor.

This is a straight from camera Olympus photo taken on 20 megapixels. I could tweak it a bit, sharpening and making it pop a little more like I did with the first picture but it is in no way inferior to the first picture. The sensor is 20 megapixels on a 2 crop factor.

This is straight from a cellphone. It’s 8 megapixels. Heaven knows what the crop factor is but it’s a pretty good photo.

Now you’ve seen images take with different megapixel counts, different sized sensors and you’re seriously going to tell me that a brand new camera system with a “full frame” camera with a stupid megapixel count is going to make your photographs that much better? I think you need to check yourself into the nut farm if you say it will!

Mark my words - this new Canon and Nikon thing is nothing more than a way of scamming yet more money out of innocent customers.

Changing direction slowly

For a long time I have been slowly selling off camera gear that I acquired as the result of a photography business I was coerced into starting. A month or two back I took the remains to the local camera club and managed to sell both camera bags and the tripod. It was a beautiful tripod - good and solid but not heavy. It also extended to about 7 feet height and had my favorite type of head - the 3D head. A few days ago I sold one of my two cameras and one of my two remaining lenses.

Depreciation on the equipment I sold has been phenomenal and trying to sell it all has been incredibly difficult. It’s as though nobody wants to buy camera gear any more. I’m sure there must still be plenty by the way that camera companies keep churning out cameras and lenses, introducing newer models each year, sometimes several times a year.

Craigslist and eBay have been total dead ends. I sold a ton of stuff for next to nothing to a camera retailer. The retailer was astonished but honestly, I’d had absolutely enough of advertising on eBay and getting no takers while being charged for listings. Sure - ebay is alleged to have free listings but I fell foul of that one time before. In order to sell without being charged there can only be one photo and there can be no reserve or minimum price. Hence a tablet that normally sold for $75 on ebay went for $12. That was utterly ludicrous. Mind, as I had so little luck in selling anything online I let it go for that just to be shot of it.

The amount of money lost on that ludicrous business (whoever heard of a photographer actually turning a profit?) was phenomenal. Let’s just say that about $10,000 turned into about $1,000. I could curse the person that coerced me into starting the business but that’s not really profitable. I’m slowly succeeding in turning dead items with bad memories into small sums of money.

Has this killed my interest in photography? Not quite. It came pretty close though. I do take far more photos with my cellphone than with an actual camera but I have plans for my newer camera. As I’m sure you’re all aware, I had a full setup with a Canon XT, Canon 30D, Canon 18-55, Canon 17-85, Canon 70-300, Tamron 28-75, Canon 50mm, a tripod, four Canon flashes, a Canon flash controller, studio lights with umbrellas, lightstands, camera bags - the whole 9 yards. The original plan had been just to have one camera and a couple of lenses. That would have kept me very happy for years. Sadly that plan was subverted.

How much money did I make from photography? Well, I had two paying sessions for $225 in total plus I wrote my books which at 65c profit per book has raked in probably another $200 so far. Then I had a session which I was thoroughly scammed with somebody giving me a check written on a closed bank account. I also had somebody book a session then cancel as soon as I arrived.

How much money do others make from photography? Judging from the vast numbers of photographers that are advertising, not very much. Indeed I met a few photographers and those that support themselves entirely from photography are very, very poor. Word has it that many of the wedding photographers run wedding photography as a side hustle or as retirement income. Quite a few run it as a tax loss.

So, where forward from here? I bought a secondhand Olympus PM1 a few years ago and it takes absolutely stunning photos. I’m sure when I get to processing the Olympus raw files I will be able to make any picture even more stunning.

Remaining from the nightmare are my Canon XT and a 70-300 lens. The camera is good but bulky and the lens is good but bulky. These days I’m in favor of smaller and lighter. The software in the cameras is so good now that control over aperture and shutter speed is much less important than it used to be. Thus I can get along quite happily with my PM1 since the vast majority of my photos are landscapes.

Two things I might get for my PM1 are the optional viewfinder and a longer lens. The XT and 70-300 are just bulky and really I’d like still to sell them. Time was during film days when camera manufacturers prided themselves on making smaller, more usable cameras. These days they have great big fishcher-price sized plastic monstrosities. Nikon had a good thing with their 1 line but went and shot themselves in the foot by discontinuing it.

Once tha remaining Canon kit is sold I shall be a lot happier There will be nothing left of the photography business nor of the nightmare. If it had not been purchased with an inheritance then I would have had few qualms about just tossing it all into a dumpster to be shot of it and the memories. I feel I have to claw back as much as I can from the wasted money.

I can’t realistically see much point in having anything other than perhaps a tabletop tripod. I take the occasional long-exposure photo but with the 25,000ISO maximum on my PM1 I can pretty well shoot hand held in all but the dimmest light.

My longest lens on the Canon went to 300mm with it being sharpest from 70 til 200mm. On a 1.4 crop factor that lens worked more as a 420mm lens. On the Olympus there is a 42-150mm lens which on the Olympus 2 crop factor is 84 - 300mm. To be honest though with my Canon a lot of the time I found 300mm was just a little too much quite often so the Olympus could work well.

The additional viewfinder and lens would turn the Olympus into a pretty decent pocket sized camera system. In fact with a system like that there would be no real need for a dedicated camera bag. One of the photographers I know (he makes his money from investments) uses an Olympus system exclusively and never has a camera bag. He just puts spare lenses into his jacket pockets. Unlike the photographers of old that had multiple backup cameras, he only ever carries one body. They’re so reliable now that there’s just no point in having multiples. Add to that that each photo can be shot at a different ISO, in color or in monochrome, the need for multiple bodies loaded with different films is nil.

Of course my biggest blunder with the photography business was in buying everything brand new. I’d only ever once before bought a brand new camera and that was a particularly awful Pentax. Since then I never bought new until I got the Canons. I have not bought new since. My Olympus was $75 secondhand. The lens was $75 secondhand. I’ll probably pay $75 for the 42-150 too. For my own use I have no need for new stuff.

I really like the Olympus because it’s small. I really liked the Nikon 1 series but they were chronically overpriced, even secondhand. My hesitation with the Nikon was because I wanted to take night sky images. I’ve not yet mastered that with the Olympus though. With the Canon it was pretty straightforward - even though this is mildly overexposed.

Sky photos have been done to death now that it’s possible to do them so they don’t truly excite me any more. Where I like to use my camera is on day trips and weekend trips. My phone is excellent as a camera but lacks a little of the finesse of a dedicated camera. Where my Olympus fails is in lacking any way of uploading images wirelessly.

Changing from being direction from Canon to Olympus is pretty slow but then I’m in no hurry. I’ve been through many camera systems in my life. Zenit, Praktika, Pentax, Nikon, Canon and now Olympus. Throughout all that time I have realised that no matter how brilliant and how much others admire my photos, nobody is going to pay money for them. Pert of that is because Flickr is out there with all the free images your heart could ever desire. Pick an image taken by a tourist and unless that tourist now lives in your own country, it’s going to be well nigh impossible for them to pursue you for copyright infringement even if you use that image commercially. Thus image sales are never going to happen.

My photography is for my own enjoyment and always has been despite the buffoons that try to convince me to sell images professionally. I’ve heard it said that Olympus isn’t of professional quality bus neither is the iPhone and yet plenty iPhone images grace websites, books and magazines.  indeed in my own books what do you think I used to take a photo of my camera setup but a cellphone?

Once I’ve got the Canon stuff out of the way and the Olympus stuff that I want then I might try my next experiment - Schlieren imaging. It looks awfully confusing from the descriptions I’ve seen. I bet though that once I get into it, it’ll work out as technically challenging but essentially as simple as high-speed imaging. Speaking of high-speed imaging, I still have a dismantled Vivitar 283 that I do eventually intend to use for more high-speed photography.

Nikon’s steaming piles of crap - the Z6 and Z7

Today Nikon announced the replacement for the 1 series (which was fairly half-assed itself). The 1 series was very expensive and lacked a decent camera. It was a novel concept worthy of further development yet the cameras were clunky beta testing models rather than anything substantial. In order to be creative, menus had to be navigated that just made the whole process much more fraught. Indeed, I tried a Nikon J1 when it came out and though it would permit me to do the things I wanted to do I had to hunt through several menues to find the options. By that time, that once in a lifetime shot of Michelle Obama’s skirt lifting to reveal that she was just a transvestite male would have long gone.

Nikon’s development of the 1 series eventually came out with a half decent but chronically overpriced camera and just as they were getting somewhere with the line, they killed it off. Now we find out why - the new camera range with the Z6 and Z7.

I won’t bore you with a review of the Z6 and Z7 - you can read fanboy reviews anywhere. The fact is that these things are the biggest pile of donkey doo-doo that Nikon has produced in quite a while. I’d say they’re on a par with Canon’s M system for awfulness. In fact I’ll guarantee that like the Nikon 1 system this new nightmare will go the way of Nikon’s Pronea system. Remember that? It used APS film. If you can’t remember, you’re probably too young and it’s definitely not worth looking up.

What makes the Z6 and Z7 so awful? Two things... First Nikon has continued with its Fischer-Price design methodology where cameras are deliberately over-sized so that toddlers can handle them easily. I really don’t know what Nikon has been thinking or if indeed they have been thinking. Their heads must surely be in their pants. The last good camera Nikon ever produced was probably the Nikon F3 or the Nikon FM2. Everything since then has been clumsily bulky and ludicrously plastic.

The second thing that makes the Z6 and Z7 really quite terrible is the price. $3,000 for a camera body? Let’s take a look at just how hard it is to make a Z6 or Z7. Don’t give me that utter BS about R&D because hardly any went into them. They’re just supersized Nikon 1 cameras. There’s nothing mechanical in either of them - just plan electronics assembled in China by work-camp labor for no real wages. The parts are the cheapest they can buy in China. Essentially you have a $30 camera with a $3,000 price tag.

For an added bonus, in order to make the cameras seem as if they’re worth buying, the megapixel count is blown out of all proportion. 24 and 45 megapixels? Who on earth needs that? Sure - I have a 20 megapixel Olympus mirrorless. I paid $75 for it three or for years ago. I have an 8 megapixel DSLR that I bought 12 years ago. I even have a 3 megapixel compact that I bought 14 years ago. They will all produce an image more than adequate to grace a digital photo album or a Facebook page.

This picture was taken with an 8 megapixel DSLR back in 2007. There are no problems with this that could be solved by using 10, 20, 30, 40 or 46 megapixels. These inflated megapixel counts are really just a pissing contest. Immature gadget addicts will buy them just so they can say theirs is bigger. That’s the only reason these things will sell. They will, of course, “justify” their purchases with specious arguments over the size of print they can make while totally neglecting to mention they don’t actually print all that much because they can’t afford to. They certainly can’t afford to print a 47 megapixel image to 300dpi (their preferred measurement) as that would be way bigger than any commercially available print. Look at your walls... how many framed 16”x20” prints can you hang on them before the walls look like a crowded mess?

This new system is Nikon desperately trying to grab a non-existent market sector. Amateur photography is all but dead. Not many people now want to buy a camera. Why should they? Their iPhone will produce an excellent image and most cellphones these days produce all the image quality people need. 

This is a cellphone image of some welding I had just completed. Nothing wrong with that picture! The cellphone in question was a cheap $29 ZTE cellphone. Documentary photography has gone to the cellphone. Many journalists use cellphones rather than TV cameras or cameras. We are at the point where expensive, over-specified cameras have become a joke. Nikon’s Z6 and Z7 are just a joke. They’re not serious cameras.

If Nikon really wanted to grab the market sector back from cellphones then they have to include data plans into their phones. They have to make upload instant from anywhere and via 4G, 3G and wifi. I have no idea what memory card they’re using but I gather it’s smaller than a standard SD card - which is already the smallest card one can comfortably use. Of course, Nikon doesn’t really care - they’re just going to slap out overpriced cameras that appeal to fewer and fewer users until their camera division eventually goes belly up.

My advice - don’t waste your money on this Z6/Z7 junk. If you want to take good pictures, look at secondhand cameras. These overbloated mega pickle counts are just there to con the unwary into buying something they don’t need. I love photography but 99.9% of the time I use a cellphone. A great many of my photographer friends are the same way, We get all the quality we need from a cellphone. If you really must have a camera then look at the secondhand market. There are plenty cretins willing to sell their expensive cameras for next to nothing in order to fund the latest Fischer-Price toy camera from Nikon etc.

Nice one Nikon. You’ll con somebody yet into buying your Z6/Z7. For me though, my opinion is that they’re  just great big steaming piles of crap.

RIP Nikon 1 series

It seems the Nikon 1 series has been discontinued. This is a real shame. It was a charming little camera with the emphasis on little. I tried one years ago and would have loved to have had one. As it was, it was way too expensive and even the secondhand first editions have been climbing in value. 

Where Nikon dropped a clanger was in aiming at a non-existent market. Devoid of easily accessed manual controls for essential things like focus, shutter speed, ISO and aperture, it was a chunky, bulky phone camera that wasn’t as nice and flat as a phone camera. It didn’t integrate particularly well with anything having no easy way of getting the images off the camera and onto a tablet.

I have my phone with me all the time. The photograph below was one I took earlier this year when I was parked up for an hour between school runs in the school bus I was driving. The light was poor yet the image is clear. It’s good enough for what I need. That’s a very important phrase that I want you to remember - good enough. 

The Nikon 1 was decried for having a small sensor. Nobody has ever complained about phones having small sensors. Except - people on Internet forums. Give them a hot dinner cooked by a top chef and free. They’ll find something to complain about and the “free” meal will be as disgusting as the slop they imagine is served in prisons. The chef will know nothing about cooking etc. So basically there is a bunch of blabbermouths on the internet flapping their lips or rather fingers typing the kind of venom they would never dare say in public for fear of a justifiable clip around the ear or punch into the middle of next week.

The pictures I saw from the Nikon 1 were excellent. As I’ve said, I wanted one. I actually bought an Olympus because it offered better options though have not taken advantage of any of those options. I have idly considered getting a Nikon 1 as well but that would be a little too bougeous.

Nikon and all the other camera manufacturers have badly misjudged the market. I recently saw a photo of a pop star standing by the crowd. Everybody in the crowd was taking a photo using a cellphone. The point is cellphones have reached the point where they all have cameras and as the photo above can take excellent photos. No doubt somebody will produce a photo taken with their speedy camera and proclaim that the cellphone image pales in comparison. That may well be true but the cellphone image is good enough. The speedy camera image is overkill. In fact expensive overkill.

Comparing a cellphone image with a camera image I can look and say better contrast, better definition, better acutance, better low light performance. These things mean nothing though. It’s like comparing a painting by a popular artist with a classical master artist. If you really look you’ll see the differences. Not everybody wants to sit studying an image through a microscope for hours on end looking for the differences. Yes - real cameras are better at photos. They suck at getting them online or onto a tablet or computer. They’re also big, bulky, heavy and ridiculously expensive.

My cellphone was $29 and I bought it without a contract. A typical camera can cost several hundred and then several hundred more for the lens. Nobody is going to sell their images no matter how good they and everybody else think they are. Look at Flickr - all the free images any user could desire. Why in God’s name with all this free stuff would anybody want to pay for images? I’ve never paid for a photo and I never will. Similarly only a few people have paid for my photos. Not enough for me to want to take photography professionally.

The Nikon 1 failed because it was aimed at the cellphone market and cellphone users just don’t want a bulkier cellphone. It was a success because it was the smallest of the amateur cameras. It could have been so much more had there been some easily accessible controls on the first edition. As it is, I am not surprised Nikon is winding up its 1 series. Canon surely won’t be too far behind in curtailing their smaller camera series.

The World had gone on its head!

Perhaps that should read off its head. The world has gone crazy lately in terms of photography. I’m not talking about innocent parents taking bathtime snaps of little Susie then getting hauled up in front of the beak for publishing them online as though they were some sex crazed pedophile. I’m taking about overall developments in photography.

Back in the days of film, photographers used film and stored their negatives or slides in binders or boxes, returning to them when they wanted to locate a particular image. These boxes or binders were usually stored in the hobby room, garage or attic.

After film came digital. The memory cards were costly and small so photographers learned to store all their images on delicate little hard hard disks. Without plugging the disk into a computer it was impossible to know just what was on a disk. With the shift from each photograph having a big upfront cost of around a dollar people were economical with their picture taking. The cost being seemingly removed by the use of hard drives, people took more photos than ever before. I’m going to say a completely insane number of photos. I’ve heard of people taking a thousand and more photos on a family vacation. Then there are the people that document every aspect of their lives and publish it online as though with so many people doing just that, anybody is actually going to admire what they publish or even view it!

That’s the obligatory - oh - that’s me shopping in Walmart photo. Who cares? Spinach is fine - at the dinner table. Shopping is a tedious necessity. We don’t need to know that you’re shopping in Walmart and buying spinach. The world certainly does not need a blow-by-blow account of your shopping expedition in photos any more than it needs a wipe-by-wipe photographic extravaganza of your latest visit to the toilet!

A lot of modern photography is absolute garbage. People have forgotten the things that matter in favor of trying to justify their purchase of expensive camera gear or an expensive phone. My phone cost me $29 and it’s a frustrating piece of junk. I would much rather have a flip phone but for the fact I get GPS on my current phone and can use it as a hotspot. The rest I couldn’t care less about.

The camera on my phone gets used a lot. I use it to document progress on my self-build motorhome project. Other than that it’s just used as a utilitarian tool. The photographs all end up stored on the memory card and seem to zip off to Google’s cloud too. While the cloud is useful for blogging, that’s its only value.

The cloud and cloud storage sounds like an absolute dream. Store your pictures free for life and you have no responsibility for curating them. Google can’t possibly fail... or can they? BCCI was too big to fail but it did. ZTE the smartphone maker was faced with closure in the face of US sanctions. There’s no such thing as too big to fail.

In the event of a Google failure virtually all smartphones with the Android operating system could just cease functioning. All the photos in Google’s cloud could end up being casually deleted as the disks are wiped then sold off to some 3rd world country. For some that would be their entire photo album vanishing overnight with no hope of recovery - births, graduations, marriages, engagements, babies - all gone.

The photographer using film is laughing because he still has all his albums. The photographer that stores all his images on a local hard disk is laughing too because he still has all his images. The world has changed since we all went over to recycling memory cards and using hard drives. I’m going to say that I’m not such a great fan of hard drives any more.

Before that let’s examine the difference between the modern photographer and the photographer of old. The photographer of old would go on holiday and take pictures. Something stunning or unusual would catch his eye and it would merit one photograph. The modern photographer photographs retry much non stop and on their return from vacation, goes through the photos, very often saying “Nice vacation. Pity I missed it”.

Part of the problem is that people look at a scene and hope that by taking loads of photos they’ll end up with something special. Ooh look - big tortoises. Let’s just keep taking pictures in case one does backflips and the other pulls out a small table and a chair and starts to make a pina colada.

Fifteen million images later - it’s still a picture of a damned tortoise. That’s not even worth a single image on Facebook. What do people do? Broadcast live images of tortoises doing absolutely nothing. They’re off their heads!

But back to hard drives.... With the price of memory cards there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever to keep using hard drives. So an 8GB card might cost $10. So what? How many hundreds or thousands of images can you store on it? Why would you even want to transfer them to a hard drive when memory cards take up little to no space.

Let’s look at the costs. Using a common 16mp camera though realistically any camera from the last 10 years produces images of higher resolution and quality than 99% of us will ever need. Raw files would be in the region of 2 megabytes. That means in the region of 500 images on a 1GB memory card. If, of course, you used JPEG then you’d likely be using way less memory and would be able to store way more images. If you cannot afford to buy a $10 memory card every 500 images or so then something is very wrong. Either you’re taking way too many images or you’re so broke you can’t afford the gas to go out to take images.

I’d rather my chances of keeping memory cards in a fire safe than letting some megacorp be my only solution. In the case of Apple, you get 5GB of storage online before that charge $50 a year for using their storage. $50 a year will buy a 128GB memory card with $5 left over at today’s prices. That’s 25 times the storage for the same price. I just don’t understand why people just don’t want to save their money!

Look again at the photographs taken. Most are trash. The only photographs future generations will value are those of past family members. They won’t care what they were eating, seeing, doing. They just want good record photos of family members. The rest is totally irrelevant. That wonderful image of a unicorn as it leaps out of the bushes with a leprechaun impaled on its horn? Nobody will give a hoot. It’ll just get tossed out.

Time to reduce the number of stupid photos you take; concentrate on quality and family and of course take responsibility for your own image storage.

No more walking round like a pregnant camel!

Today the local camera club is having a swap shop where one can sell one’s old camera gear. Sadly the camera gear I possess is not worth as much as I paid. Let’s see what I have and what the KEH price is...

Canon XT - New $800... KEH $69
Canon 30D - New $1200... KEH $139
Canon 17-85IS - New ($500 ish) ...KEH $149
Canon 70-300IS - New ($500 ish)... KEH $248
Manfrotto 3021BN - New $150 ... eBay $89
3D head - new $50... unknown at unknown

That really is a piss poor amount over what was originally paid. Mind, I was scammed by an expert into buying new when my gut instinct told me to buy secondhand.

New I spent in the region of $3250. Secondhand I could get up to $694 (on a very good day). More likely a lot less.

The thing that cracks me up is with this massive depreciation, Camera companies complain their sales are plummeting. Nobody wants to be caught with their pants down like I did.

A while ago, I bought a secondhand Olympus PM1 for $75 and another $75 for the lens. New the camera alone would have been $600is and I have no idea what the lens would have cost. Using pure JPEG for the images, the images are only a little behind what the Canon produces after the CR2 files have been processed. I have not yet got a computer capable of processing Olympus raw files. Thus I shoot raw+JPEG and save the raw files for whenever I get access to a suitable computer.

But look at the difference in camera size. The one on the right takes 20MP images and the one on the left, 8MP. The one on the right is 90% automated but the one on the left is hard to get into manual mode. In terms of image quality it’s pretty much a tie.

That image was taken in CR2 and processed in Aperture on my elderly MacBook. It’s pretty darned good! It was taken on the Canon XT.

That image was taken in JPEG. Sure I could tweak it a bit but that was straight out of the camera with no tweaking. It was taken on the Olympus PM1.

So, it looks like a very close contest imagewise. The Olympus wins sizewise. Manual is possible on the Olympus but it’s a real pain in the rear to engage as is the exposure compensation. Instead of flip flap done on a manual film SLR it’s all fiddle fiddle pokey pokey on digital cameras. Neither is the exception.

The only question is how much I can actually sell and how much I can carry given my bad back. I know when I do sell, I’ll want to get the eyepiece viewfinder and a longer lens for my Olympus.

Now this is really nifty!

A few days ago I was still of the belief that living in a motorhome where the only power supply comes from USB ports, I’d not be able to do any photography. How wrong I was! On eBay there was a charger for my elderly Olympus camera battery that ran off a USB port. I’ve - as you can see - got the battery charging right now.

The other nifty thing about this is I don’t actually have to use any mains electricity to charge my battery. The electricity comes straight from daylight, converted by some very small solar panels. I’d say this is the way to the future. Having said that, I suspect charging might take quite a while. That’s perfectly fine for me though. I have just one battery and take photos only occasionally these days. That’s probably more due to most of my time being expended on building my motorhome and by a strange thing commonly known as “working”.

I could not see any chargers for Canon batteries such as that for the XT or the 30D. Nor could I see any AA or D cell chargers. Having said that I didn’t look extensively. For my motorhome I can definitely see advantages in charging AA and D cells from USB. They power not only auxiliary lighting but currently the shower and the door unlocker. If I were to buy a flash (highly unlikely) then they would power the flash too.

Ages ago I simplified my camera gear down to just what I actually use. That is my elderly Olympus and a single standard lens. Certainly it would be nice to have a longer lens but I can’t really see the value in purchasing or possessing one given both the amount of actual camera photography I do these days and the fact that the standard 14-42 covers pretty much every aspect I’m likely to want. There are those that would argue that one should be able to cover just about every focal range. Good luck to them and their backs, carrying all that crap every day!

The benefit of smaller cameras like the Olympus over larger cameras such as the Canons is not just in weight but bulk. I almost went for a Nikon 1 system. I’m not 100% sure now why I didn’t. I suspect the secondhand Olympus was substantially cheaper. These days I’d probably rather have paid a fraction more and had the smaller Nikon system.

Photographers tend to rabbit on ad nauseous about needing full manual control of absolutely everything. The fact is that automatic is so darned good these days that manual modes are just getting very geeky. My Olympus has several modes and the ability to go for full manual. What mode do I use? iAuto! That gets just about every photo taken perfectly. I just don’t need to get down and dirty with full manual, shutter priority, aperture priority etc as we used to in the days of film. In fact if the photo turns out to be rubbish I can simply retake it.

I’d say the somewhat dubious profession (if you can indeed call it a profession) of photography is dead in the water. Nobody hires photographers any more Everybody with a cellphone has a camera that is so darned good that real cameras are a bit of an anachronism.

The world has moved on from the days of film and real cameras. It started slowly with photographers getting external then built-in light meters in their cameras. Then they got auto exposure, shutter priority, aperture priority etc. Eventually autofocus crept in. By then cameras were so highly automated that I questioned why we still wasted our time on film especially given that TV cameras took electronic images. The ability to take digital images goes way back to 1926 when John Logie Baird built the first television camera. That’s over 90 years ago. Kodak even built a digital camera in 1975 but didn’t sell it because it would have depressed film sales. By the time the short-lived APS film came out in the 1990s I was questioning the worth of APS because with its magnetic stripe for recording exposure data, it was pretty darned close to having digital images.

So, the world gets more electronic, easier, faster and more reliant than ever upon electricity. Even our cars have become overloaded with computerized gadgetry that’s fine when it works but is a major headache when it doesn’t. Speaking of which, I saw my very first Tesla Model X yesterday or indeed my first Tesla ever.

Yes, it’s a cellphone image taken on a dull day but there’s another of my points! I have my cellphone with me all the time. My camera - not so much. I must be a shade behind with technology!

Walking on the dark side

For the past three years I’ve been devoting almost all of my free time not to photography but to building a motorhome out of an old school bus. The concept was that since I only seem to get the rubbish jobs in South Carolina, I’d be better off moving to a different state. Thus the project began and it has taken an absolute age.

In the last 18 months after deciding I wasn’t that good at driving my own bus, I took a job with a school district with the aim of learning to drive a school bus. That turned into a quite acceptable job with more money than I was getting from what I was doing previously.

While photography with a real camera has taken a bit of a back seat for the moment that doesn’t mean my interest in photography has dwindled any. In fact I still enjoy going out and taking photos. I’m saving every penny to complete my motorhome though so I don’t get to go out to fun places very often.

My big photo project of the last couple of years has been my bus conversion. Most of that has been documented with a cellphone purely because the quality of cellphones today is little short of excellent. While dedicated cameras do produce work that is a little better, the difference is pretty minimal to be honest.

Perhaps the most interesting photograph I’ve taken lately is of a bullet hole in a school bus. Yes - somebody fired what looks like a .45 bullet at a school bus while it was on the interstate. It penetrated the outer skin and was arrested by a nut attached to the inner skin. It just dented one corner of the nut and dropped to the floor of the bus. This demonstrates how ineffective pistols are against vehicles and their occupants.

After years of people saying “you can’t charge a camera battery from a USB source” it now appears that it’s possible. I just bought a USB powered charger for my Olympus e-pm1. That’s very welcome!  I won’t be getting one for my Canon though as I just don’t find I use my Canon, these days. It’s just big and bulky as well as heavy. I much prefer my small, light Olympus. It’s not as if I’m ever actually going to sell any photographic works. They’re purely for my own enjoyment.

Those with memories like elephants will recall that somebody managed to pull the wool over my eyes and convinced me photography in the USA was lucrative whereas in the UK had somebody tried to convince me of the same I’d have probably smacked them in the head. Sadly I had several people when I first arrived in the USA trying to and often succeeding to convince me with falsehoods. Anyway the upshot was I ended up with an excess of Canon camera gear - most of which I sold, virtually unused, at a massive loss several years later.  The reason I keep one camera is because it’s something my late mother bought me as a gift. That, I’ll always cherish. Otherwise I use my Olympus.

So, since my bus has only USB power installed, I had to hunt for a USB camera battery charger. I have no idea how well it’ll work but for $9 and being shipped from California (instead of China), it’s worth a shot. If it works that means I’ll be able to charge my camera battery from my solar-powered USB charger. That means if I went for a couple of weeks camping in the Arizona desert that I’d be able to keep my camera battery charged.

I had a look back at some model photos I took some years ago using my Canon and the expensive flash setup I had (that I subsequently sold) and the photos are excellent. Definitely professional quality. In terms of professional photography - don’t make me laugh. Nobody that claims to be a professional photographer is anything more than a bum with a camera. They could live far better by getting a real job and forgetting about photography as an income. Every time I hear the description professional photography, I am reminded of the tale of one of the British photographers who would regularly run to and from from the pawn shop, pawning equipment until he got a paying client.

When I think of a professional photographer, I think of a seedy character who’s not entirely to be trusted. Indeed one or two “professional” photographers come frequently to make paid presentations at camera club meetings. Invariably there’s something seedy and down-at-heel about them. The threadbare clothes or the dirty fingernails. Nothing that says “I make money” or “I am successful” or “this is a good job”.

Would I allow a “professional” photographer into my house? No - I most certainly would not. If one ever came near my property I’d be out counting the geraniums to make sure he hadn’t pinched any.