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.
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