Tag: photography

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State of the cameras update

I already did a post in February about the current camera situation. That’s still evolving, and I’m procrastinating on my real writing, so let me ramble a bit.

First, the Sony a6400 ended up going off to KEH, as did all the lenses. End of experiment there. I know people love Sony, but it just did not work for me. At least I did not get completely swindled on the trade-in. (Thanks to KEH on that.)

The Canon R10, I think I’m largely settled in on it. My only big complaints were lack of GPS and lenses. The GPS part: I was able to get the camera to talk to my phone and automatically grab GPS data and reset its clock when I change time zones. That’s handy, because I always forget, and end up with a swath of pictures that are out of sync with my phone pics. As far as lenses, I picked up Canon’s 16mm f/2.8 and Sigma’s 18-50mm f/2.8 Contemporary, both in RF mount. The 16 is very small and decent but the 18-50 has pretty much stayed on the camera full-time since I got it a few weeks ago. I didn’t want to invest in a ton of RF glass that I can’t use with my other cameras, but I also didn’t want to drag around giant pro lenses plus the adapter, and it looks a bit silly hanging off of such a tiny camera.

I’ve been shooting more film as of late. That slowed down after Iceland, but I’ve got a hoard of at least 50 rolls of film I should probably burn off. I shot a few rolls in Cambodia with the Olympus XA-2, which is such a great little camera. It’s pocketable, dead simple to use, and shoots amazing photos. I put a quick album of the Cambodia snaps over on Flickr. Only regret there is I didn’t take more pictures. I’ve also been dragging out the EOS 620 a bit more. I have the Canon 35mm f/2, which is incredibly sharp and has IS, but is a bit of a beast. Works great on this camera. Even better is when I drag out the 16-35mm f/4 L. That lens has such an amazing look when I’m using it wide open on a beach or mountain, just amazing dreamy vibes.

And yeah, I’m back on Flickr I guess. I nuked all my old albums and started fresh. There’s one album of my favorites from Iceland, but I’ve got to start over, basically. I burned a lot of cycles going back and forth on what to do about public photo hosting, and gave up. There’s not much of a community on Flickr anymore, but it’s one of the easiest ways to share out of Lightroom without sinking even deeper into the Adobe ecosystem, which I want to avoid. I’ll add more albums as I clean up and keyword old trips, which will happen most likely never, given current time constraints.

For some dumb reason, I thought it would be fun to try Kodak’s new half-frame camera, the Ektar H35N. It’s a “vintage look” point-and-shoot that shoots in portrait orientation, so you get 72 half-sized shots from a 36-shot roll. I got it, and it’s absolute junk. It’s roughly the same quality as a disposable camera, without the cardboard sleeve on the outside. Fixed shutter speed; fixed aperture; a built-in flash that might or might not work correctly. I loaded a roll into it, shot a dozen shots, and the dial was still reading S. I figured the film didn’t grab the teeth and wasn’t advancing, so I popped the door, and of course it was a dozen shots in and I ruined the roll. So this is going straight into the bin.

The other camera I got – and yes, why am I buying all these cameras? – is the Fujifilm Instax Mini EVO. This is a bizarre little thing, a “vintage looking” camera that’s really a combination of an Instax mini printer and a 2010-era 5MP digital camera. You point and shoot digitally, writing the images to a mini-SD card like you’re using an old Powershot, and you can spray-and-pray as many pics as you want without burning film. Later you review your takes, find the perfect shot, and flip the “film advance” thumb lever; the image gets printed on the mini-instant film. I’ve got an older Instax, and the usual drill is I take ten shots to burn up a pack of film, and maybe three are okay. Now I shoot twenty, thirty, and print the couple of keepers. And if I want to hand a copy to someone, I print two.

It shoots slightly better than the dumb version, but you also have a screen on the back to line up shots, instead of straining to look through a plastic-lens viewfinder. The camera also has ten film effects and ten lens effects, so you get a sort of cheap version of the Fujifilm emulation you’d find in an X100. I’d say there are maybe three of each that are acceptable, and it’s definitely not an Instagram-killer. You can also digital zoom a bit and play with the exposure compensation, the latter which is useful. It’s got a flash, too.

What is neat to me is that if you have the app on your phone, you can use the camera as a photo printer. Find a picture on your phone, and you can zap one or more copies straight to the camera and print them. This is an awesome feature, because I can take a super-sharp picture from the iPhone and it will make an amazing print on the white-border instant film. It’s both a modern not-plastic-lens shot and has the dreamy analog feel of instant camera film.

The Evo is slightly corny, and it’s slightly too big to be pocketable. Using it as a travel camera would be problematic, because it has this certain “look at me, I shop at Urban Outfitters” vibe to it, and I wouldn’t want it hanging around my neck all day, but it’s too big to stuff in a jeans pocket. Also, I’d expect any Instax film to get destroyed by TSA. “You can get them to hand-check your film” is right up there with “the airline will get you a hotel if you’re delayed” and “the free market will sort out retirement accounts.” Instax film packs are ISO 800, and the new stronger CT scanners are showing up everywhere. Of course, I could pop in a Target if I’m traveling domestically and buy some new film, or pack a lead bag with film packs. Or I guess I could just shoot away for a week and print what I want when I get home. But by that logic, I could just leave the whole thing behind and shoot on my phone.

Next two trips are booked. One is a quick one domestically in two weeks. The other is a much bigger thing in August. Stay tuned.

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State of the Cameras, 2025 edition

Canon camerasAs expected, before this Norway trip, I had a big freak-out about what cameras to take, which led to too many discretionary purchases. Let me explain.

There were two main cameras before the trip. The big one is the Canon EOS 6D mkii. It’s a great camera and ticks a lot of boxes: full-frame, weather sealed, uses the EF lenses and I’ve got a couple of great L lenses for it, runs forever on a single battery, excellent sensor, built-in GPS and it’s a DSLR so it doesn’t have the usual problems a mirrorless has. More than that, it’s got the usual Canon design language and I like the way it feels, the way the controls are laid out, and the way the Canon works. And as much as I like it, it is not light or small. Glue two pounds of glass to the front end of it, and it’s really not great to haul around all day. And I’ve taken some okay photos with it, but it seems like I was almost doing better with a much lighter crop-sensor camera.

In 2023, I got a Sony Alpha a6400. It’s half the weight of the 6D and much easier to shove in a bag. I’ve taken this camera to India, Singapore, and Spain, and it’s okay, but the ergonomics of it are bugging me. It’s just different, and I can’t explain it. The menu system is complete garbage, but it feels so toy-like and cheap, it’s not enjoyable to use at all. And there’s something off about the color space or the exposure program or something, and I’m constantly blowing shots with it. It’s hard to use in daylight, and isn’t entirely capable at night. And regardless of the time of day, it seriously chews through batteries. I often think that I need better lenses or more practice or more patience with it. And then I go take a hundred shots in an afternoon and look at them and wonder what’s wrong.

And I struggle to say what “kind” of photographer I am. I’m not like a street photographer or a devoted landscape photographer or specialize in portraiture or whatever. I don’t know if I am even a photographer in the artistic sense of the word. I like to capture things, and I like to go back and look through photos to revisit a mood or relive a trip or write about something that happened in the past. I am more of a “document everything” person, and if I get a great shot out of it, cool. But that lack of a specific genre or focus makes me flail when it comes to buying gear, because that’s really the first question someone asks when you are trying to find out what to get, right?

I also have been wandering back and forth on photos versus video, and I have no answers there. Since the 90s, I’ve experimented with different cameras, thinking I needed to shoot video to capture a mood or feeling or vacation or whatever. That started with buying a Hi8 camcorder back in like 1996, which was entirely impractical and largely useless to me. I never took that camera with me, because it weighed so much and I was never comfortable walking around with it and taking random video. I absolutely love the videos I did capture (see https://www.rumored.com/randomlife) but with the impracticality of it, I never used it.

So, two things. First, I decided to get another Canon mirrorless. I was reluctant to do this because i bought an EOS-M1 about ten years ago and bought into their flop of a mirrorless system. They’ve since moved to a new platform, and it’s stabilized and picked up steam, so I thought I’d give it a try. I also thought maybe going back to crop sensor might help. So I bought a Canon EOS R10. It uses a new type of lens, the RF; I didn’t want to buy into that with all my EF lenses, so I bought the adaptor. This also lets me use some of my old EF-S crop lenses from when I had Rebel cameras, so that’s useful. The R10 is amazingly light, uses the same batteries as my old Rebel T6i, and isn’t horribly bad on battery life, especially compared to the Sony. It’s not weatherproof (which was a problem in Norway, walking in the snow all day every day) and there’s no more GPS. (I don’t know why, but I love having a GPS on my cameras.) It also has incredible autofocus and a great sensor. Not only does it have eye tracking autofocus, but it can eye track on animals, which is useful for someone who takes a thousand pictures of their cats a year.

More than anything, the R10 feels like a Canon camera. The Program mode works like I’m used to. It feels the same in my hand. I don’t have to think to know where the knobs are. It’s not as full-featured as the 6D, but it feels the same. It feels the same as both of my Rebels, and even my old EOS 620 film camera.

The other thing, the video thing: I don’t know why, but on a lark, I bought a DJI Osmo Pocket 3. It’s an amazing little gizmo, a gimbal camera in a thing the size of a TV remote, with a screen that flips from portrait to landscape. This was largely a useless purchase, as I’m not going to be full-time vlogging over on TikTok or anything like that. But it does shoot incredible video, and it’s extremely small. I think it’s close to being the perfect “document-everything” camera, and I got a few good shots out of it in Norway.

So, the Sony’s probably going to go. I’m too lazy and impatient to sell it on eBay, and I know I’ll get nothing for it on KEH. But I think the Sony experiment is over. I am not sure if I’m going to start buying RF lenses, although given the current state of things, probably not a good idea to be dropping more money on gear. And the film thing – I’ve still got a few dozen rolls on ice, but I have lost all passion for shooting film these days. I feel like if I’m going to make a bunch of mistakes with exposure, I shouldn’t do it at a dollar a shot. I was completely unhappy with the film I burned in Iceland in 2023, and haven’t gotten back into it since. Fair enough.

And all of this is secondary to what I should be doing: writing. That’s the main priority, so I should get back to it.

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2024’s top ten pictures

I did not take many pictures in 2024. 2022 was a year I tried to go whole-hog into photography and I took just over 12,000 pictures. Last year: 3,200. Part of this was less travel; part of it was having two injuries that sidelined me a bit. But also, I didn’t focus on photography as much because I spent a lot more of my energy on writing, which is good.

Anyway, here’s my top ten.

So, five from Vietnam, one from Spain, and four from California. Six were taken with the Canon 6D mkii, two were from an iPhone, one was with a Sony a6400, and one was with a DJI Osmo Pocket3. About 1900 of that 3200 were from an iPhone 14 Pro; about 800 were from the 6D, and most of the rest were the Sony. (The DJI is relatively new.)

I’m not 100% with this WordPress gallery thing, but I’m also not posting giant photo dumps on Flickr or whatever anymore. Does this work? Is it sustainable? Not sure. It seems okay for a small number of photos, though.

Took 100-some photos at the Alviso salt ponds yesterday, and it was good to get out and do that. I don’t know if this is just New Year/New Me nonsense or if I can build up some inertia, but we’ll see.

 

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Denver

Hello from Denver. I’ve been out here for a week, for the first time in a dozen years, and… it’s weird. Weird doesn’t start to explain it.

So I lived in Denver from 2007-2008. Made a few work visits back in 08, and I think I came out maybe two more times for Rockies games. I haven’t been back since except for the occasionl layover in the airport. I had to take a week off, and wanted to get out somewhere to take some pictures and do nothing, and after the usual searches of prices versus temperature versus infection rate, I landed on taking the week in Colorado.

This whole trip has been a weird deja vu experience. I sat in the baggage area and had flashbacks of every time I ever flew home, going back to the first time I flew to the city in 2007. Got my suitcase, went outside and breathed the rarefied air and gazed out at the big sky and fluffy clouds that looked like they were floating ten feet above the ground, and I felt like I’d been gone for a week and was back. Something about the look of the place, the way the light comes through the sky, the way the air tastes, is totally unique in my head, always brings me back to that specific time of my life.

I got the rental car, headed out on the highway towards my hotel in the tech center and realized everything was different. They built a train to the airport. They built apartments everywhere. They built shopping centers everywhere. There are new giant towers of tech industry where there used to be empty fields. It’s like when I go back to Indiana and the bones are the same but everything has decayed, but the opposite. Some of the highways and such are in the same place, but everything else has grown.

* * *

One of the reasons I came out was to work on school stuff. So part of the stay has been hanging out in this residence hotel and banging out papers. I’ve written three, and barely started a fourth. Not into talking much about this yet, except to say I’m incredibly rusty and not in the zone yet. First, I haven’t written anything in six months, but I haven’t written sourced scholarly papers in… a while. 1993, maybe? So, it’s taking me about an hour a paragraph to knock out 16-page papers, which is not ideal. Didn’t I used to write thousand-page books?

The other reason was the photo thing. I got a new camera before I came out, a Canon EOS 5DS. It is a monster of a camera, weighing about double my old DSLR. Full-frame, 50 megapixel, weather-sealed, dual-card, and none of the nicey consumer features like a built-in flash or a selfie screen or a Wi-Fi adapter or anything. It’s a beast, and honestly, I’ve been fighting it the whole trip. I’m not used to any of the settings, and I’m constantly screwing up metering or getting depth of field wrong, because it responds completely differently than my old body. So I’ve shot a few thousand shots on this trip, but I’m not super happy with much.

* * *

I’ve been specifically avoiding various nostalgia points, because I don’t want to completely deep-six myself mentally. I did see my old apartment Sunday; I went on a long walk with a photographer friend, and went in loops around the ballpark area and the 16th Street mall for like eight miles. The more I walk around Denver, the more I see that either I didn’t get out much, or things have totally changed. And the areas where I did spend time are completely different. I used to work down in Meridian/Lone Tree, and all I used to do is drive to work, drive to Taco Bell, drive to Target, drive home. And that area was nothing but the Target, the Taco Bell and a few other fast food joints, and lots of barren land. I went down there, and it’s now a sea of condos, and a new train station and pedestrian bridges and lots of parks and sod and outdoor sculptures and the whole nine. So I lived here, but I didn’t live here.

Lots of other photo ops. I drove down to Garden of the Gods. Drove to the Air Force Academy. Hit air museums in Pueblo and at the old Lowry AFB. Went to Idaho Springs and walked around the old mining town a bit. Three or four malls were visited. Also met with a coworker (only the third time this has happened in a year) and did a big lap at Washington Park. Weather’s been decent, other than a freak hail storm when I was in Colorado City, so the walks and photos have been nice.

* * *

Had a really weird deja vu last night. I was walking around this area after dinner. This part of the DTC is all residence inns and empty condo buildings, with the occasional warehouse or factory, so it’s a great walk to take at dusk. Something about the weather, the heat, the air, the darkness, gave me this exact time travel portal, and I felt like it was a night in the summer of 1989, a late night after working at Wards all day, in the air conditioning from 10 to 9, then hitting the air that was a hundred all day and was then 80 after sunset. There was always such a strong feeling of… I don’t know, a mix of loneliness and possibility. Like I was the only person alive in the town, mixed with an uplifting feeling that something big was going to happen soon, and this was the temporary lull before it did. I don’t know how to explain it more than that, except I would get fleeting flashes of the same thing in the summer of 1992, the summer of Summer Rain, and that was one of the real motivating reasons to write that book.

And I’m thinking about that, too. And I should write more. But the sun is going down in about 20 minutes, so maybe I will go take another walk.

Flying out tomorrow, then it’s back to the grind. Stay tuned for more pics.

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On the Road

Hello from Chicagoland. I am here for a long weekend, for a wedding. As per policy at rumored dot com, I don’t write about family, and most of the trip is family stuff, so this will be short.

Flying for the first time in over two years was… fun. I had a real trial by fire, because I ended up taking an Oakland to Denver to Kansas City to Midway flight. And unbeknownst to me until the day of the flights, this was right after the TSA dropped the mask mandate. I kept N95’ed the whole trip, but a whole lot of other people were not masked, including every single Southwest crew member. I know my desire to not get sick this week makes me a Nazi and anti-freedom or whatever the hell. Nobody bothered me about it, but I’m expecting some flak this trip about it. I hate this timeline.

I’m in the same hotel type I was in last August in El Segundo. My room is reversed, but otherwise identical, except my view is of an industrial park instead of palm trees. It’s at an intersection of highways that is identically cloned in many other parts of the country. There’s a Hyatt, a Hilton, a Holiday Inn; a Wendy’s, a Burger King, a Denny’s, and a Walgreen’s. The whole area feels like it was cloned in the early 00s, and is a duplicate of the same office park area that could be found outside Denver, or in the far reaches of Seattle, or somewhere outside Columbus, Ohio.

I managed to take photo 10,000 on my T6i DSLR yesterday. It was of a Golden Corral that’s by the hotel. (No I am not eating there.) There’s not a lot to snap around my hotel. I did find a Zayre’s store that looks like it was abandoned in 1990, when Ames bought the chain. I also wandered an office/light industrial park next to the hotel loop. I don’t know why I find that sort of thing interesting, but it’s somewhat relaxing to me to walk an empty set of factories on a sleepy Saturday morning. I like the identical brick one-story buildings, each with a picnic table by the rusty loading dock on the side. I guess part of it is working at those places as a kid. But yeah, it’s not like taking a photo tour of the glaciers of Iceland or anything.

I did get to see John Sheppard on Friday. Always good to see him. We met at the big mall, Woodfield, in Schaumburg. I last went to this mall in 1989, and it has completely changed. It’s a Taubman, and I’ve spent enough time in them in California that I instantly recognize the bones of the place. Like in both Woodfield and Hilltop in Richmond, CA (RIP) if you’re in the JC Penney on the top floor, you hang a right and there’s the mall offices and restrooms. At Stoneridge, it’s on the left. The balconies are similar; the stairs are in similar spots. That mall has been “Simon-ized” since I last visited; the brown bricks and red carpets and wood trim and fountains have all been replaced with white on white on white. Other than the dead Sears, the mall looked healthy, lots of shops and foot traffic for a mid-day. But the mall of my memory was completely gone.

Pouring rain today (cue that Alanis song) and I’ve got to get dressed up for a 4:30 wedding. Probably time to go find a mall and do a quick lap or two, though.

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Sunday, travel, dental, driving randomly

Now that I’ve posted here the last few Sundays, I feel like I need to post here every Sunday. That would be a good routine to get into, although I don’t always have anything to talk about, especially when I’m too busy all week and do nothing but work and try to sleep. So, here we are.

I might not update next Sunday because I’ll be in the Midwest. This is a quick trip back for a wedding. No Indiana; this is in Illinois. I’m being somewhat vague about my actual travel plans, because who knows how much they’ll shift, and I don’t want to make solid promises on anything. I haven’t flown in two years, and have no idea how this will go. I am going to bring a single camera, my main DSLR, and maybe an extra lens, but maybe not. I’m not going to mess with a backup or a film camera or whatever else. My backup is my iPhone.

That main camera – the Canon Rebel T6i – has been getting a ton of mileage on it. I mentioned hitting 8000 shots the other day. In the last 11 days, I’ve shot another 1600 pictures. If I don’t cross the 10,000 line by the time I leave this week, I definitely will when I’m gone. It’s funny that my biggest year by volume was in 2010 when I shot just under 4000 shots across all of my cameras. In the first four months of 2022, I’ve shot over 5000 shots. Gotta keep the rhythm going. (If you’re curious, the best of this stuff is slowly getting posted over at my Instagram.)

* * *

True to brand, I managed to crack a tooth right before vacation. Actually, I should have done it while on vacation, but I got a head start on it. It’s fairly minor, no pain and just a little edge next to a filling that’s chipped. I went to the dentist yesterday, and he said it needs a crown, but filed it off a bit to get me sorted in the short term. I’ll go back the day after I return and get it all tore down and set up, then spend a few weeks on protein shakes and soft foods.

I got finished with the dental appointment down in San Bruno at about 9:30 in the morning Saturday. It was raining, just a sprinkle, and a fog had socked in most of the hills in South San Francisco and Daly City. I drove around the peninsula, stopping here and there to snap a few shots with the mist in the distance, which was harder than I thought. Every time I would see a perfect scene, I’d then try to park the car somewhere, run out, and realize it didn’t look as grand, or the wind would shift and the fog was gone or the clouds moved. I need more practice with this, or a good map and some research.

Daly City is the little boxes made of ticky-tacky as made famous by the Malvina Reynolds song. (Or Pete Seeger, or the theme song from Weeds, depending on your age.) So I was driving around there, trying to capture a good line of little pastel houses with a dense fog in the background, and did only so-so with that. I also drove to Thornton State Beach. I was more excited about that one, because by the time I turned onto Skyline, I was basically driving through a gray cloud. But when I got to the beach, it was closed to the public, and I could only walk on one little trail to a roundabout and take some distance shots of the ocean from there. Lots of choppy waves and low-hanging clouds off the water, but I didn’t have the right spot or the right light to get anything too grandiose.

I did a quick lap at the Serramonte Center mall, then got home by noon. Decent field trip.

* * *

I have been making more of an effort to drive around randomly without a GPS. I did that today, too. Exited the highway near Moraga, and just drove, winding through hills and looking for places where I could shoot a photo or two. I used to do a lot of this as a kid in Indiana. When I first got a car, I would drive everywhere, going to places I never usually traversed as a kid, finding different routes and seeing new things.

I can remember many a weekend in Seattle doing the same thing, just aimlessly driving up and down the isthmus, heading parallel to I-5, avoiding traffic by taking side streets and getting lost in parts of Echo Lake or Ballard or whatever, driving in a direction I thought might be east, trying to get back to a highway or a Denny’s or something I recognized.

Back then I only had the laminated tri-fold map, Seattle’s grid/numbering system, and the mnemonic “Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest.” (Jefferson, James, Cherry, Columbia, Marion, Madison, Spring, Seneca, University, Union, Pike, Pine.) This is how I vaguely figured out the city, found a lot of weird record stores, and burned a lot of time. It’s a bit of a lost art now, since I only drive from A to B and follow the road Google tells me to follow. I’m trying to break myself of that on Sundays to find new places to shoot.

* * *

Not much else. I have an abbreviated work week and a lot to do, plus figure out packing. Provided this trip goes okay, I think I need to take another trip in June, but I have no idea where. Not the Midwest, not Vegas. I was thinking Seattle, but I am not sure. I’ll have to pull up Amex travel and see what’s cheap, what I’m willing to deal with. But first, I have to see if I have any travel-size toiletries that haven’t turned into solids in the last two years. (And Target was closed on Easter? That’s surprising, at least out here.)

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Photo numbers: a history

Yesterday, I took the 8000th picture with my Canon T6i. It was nothing spectacular, just a quick snap at the park by my house in a series of a hundred-some pictures of a park where I’ve taken way too many photos over the years. The sun was wrong and the glare was a bit much, but I hit hit a big round number on the odometer, a curiosity, but something I’ve been slightly obsessed with.

I’m not sure what is considered a lot of photos. I think wedding photographers take maybe two or three thousand per event. Baseball photographers are about the same. I think an average outing for me is about 100 shots an hour. Turn on bracketing and I take three times as many. I haven’t shot a baseball game in forever, but that’s when I turn on continuous shooting and burst through a dozen shots at once.

My Lightroom catalog currently has 47548 photos in it. Maybe 200 of them were taken by others, childhood photos. My pre-digital film history is about 600 pictures, plus or minus whatever I haven’t scanned yet. After I got my first digital camera at the end of 2000, the magic of EXIF metadata takes over, and it’s very easy to track my output.

I got an Olympus D-460 in the final days of the year 2000. 1.2 MP, a 3x optical zoom, SmartMedia cards, and a odd-sized disposable lithium battery (CR-V3 – try finding that on vacation). The camera was small, but not pocketable. It was similar to film cameras in that you consciously had to carry them with you, in a special case or pouch, along with special cables and card readers and batteries and accessories.

From 2000-2005, I took 2817 photos with the Olympus camera. That includes I think eight Vegas trips, two Florida trips, a Hawaii trip, and some other oddball jaunts, plus everything around town. A week out of town would typically mean maybe 150 photos, with about 20% of them being blurry or dark. It was definitely behind the curve technology-wise, but I managed some great pictures with it. An example album: my 2003 Hawaii trip.

In 2005, I was about to go to Hawaii for the second time, and wanted a better camera. I picked up a Fujifilm FinePix S3100, which was an oddball hybrid point-and-shoot. It looked almost like a baby DSLR with the side grip and larger 6x (non-removable) lens, but it was only 4MP, and definitely not pocketable. It did use AA batteries, but sported the oddball xD memory card, so I needed yet another card reader. This camera was capable of taking better pictures, but it was also notoriously bad about botching things in automatic mode.

The Fuji saw 4044 shutter activations from when I bought it in 2005 to when TSA broke the zoom lens in the fall of 2007. It went to Hawaii, Berlin, Amsterdam, Alaska, a few Wisconsin and Indiana trips, and made the move to Colorado. I just about doubled my annual pace with this one. Example albums: Amsterdam 2005 and Berlin 2006.

In 2007, right as we were entering Rocktober and I was going to many baseball games, I picked up a Canon PowerShot A570. My dad had a similar camera, and Canon seemed to be ticking a lot of boxes with the PowerShot series: a bit bigger than a deck of cards; standard AA batteries; standard SD cards; a decent (4x) optical zoom; 7 MP; manual modes; optical viewfinder (this was when they were vanishing from smaller cameras and you had to hold it at arms’ length and squint to look at the LCD screen you couldn’t see in the sun), and about two hundred bucks. It even shot video. This camera wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t pro, but I loved it.

I got 2093 shots out of the A570 in the 15 months I had it. It went through the end of the 2007 baseball season, went to the Bahamas on our honeymoon, and covered our move to LA and then to the Bay Area. And then on a Christmas trip to Milwaukee in 2008, I dropped it in the toilet at the Harley-Davidson museum, and that was that. An example album from before its subermersion: Bahamas 2007.

I quickly ordered the next iteration of the PowerShot, the A590. It was mostly the same camera, with a 1 MP bump up, and weighing about an ounce less. I still have that camera (somewhere) but it effectively was used only in the year 2009. Two things happened: the addition of a DSLR for a main workhorse, and the addition of an iPhone, which meant my day-to-day shooting pictures of cats and walks at work and whatnot now happened on the camera always in my pocket. Regardless, the A590 got 1838 shots in a year. Example album: Mexico 2009.

My first DSLR was a Canon Rebel XS, which I got for my birthday in 2010. This completely exploded the amount of photos I took. There were two baseball games that August in Denver where I took more pictures in 18 innings than I did in the entire 2007 season. Part of that was burst mode, and part of it was a constant need to change lenses. Due to the DSLR, my more frequent use of the iPhone, and my return to film in 2014, I quadrupled my output in this era. My total shutter count on that camera is 10873. It went about everywhere in the six years it was my main camera: London, Berlin, Nuremberg twice, Frankfurt, a few Hawaii trips, a bunch of Midwest holiday runs, and I’m sure more I’m forgetting. There’s lots of the XS on my Flickr, but a good example is Hawaii 2013.

I tried going to the EOS M mirrorless, but it didn’t take, Right before my trip to London, I upgraded to the T6i I use now. I used it on that first London trip, my last Alaska trip, some Vegas weeks, and other odd stuff, but I didn’t put a lot of mileage on it. It also didn’t get much use at the start of the pandemic. Total shots from 2016 to last fall was about 2500. I’m still using it, but a good example album would be Memphis and Graceland 2016.

So I’ve about tripled that in the last three months, and I need to continue. I don’t think I’m a great photographer, and I don’t know if the number of times the shutter clicks is any indicator of progress. But that’s the goal right now, to get as many pixels into memory and try to look at them, learn, correct, and keep going.

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general

New camera: Canon EOS 620

Because apparently I don’t have enough film cameras in the house, I got another one recently: the Canon EOS 620.

Film isn’t cheap right now, and some cameras are getting ridiculous. The Canonet QL17 rangefinder I bought in 2014, probably one of my best film cameras, costs roughly three times as much on the open market now. An Olympus XA2 you couldn’t give away for $20 back in the early 00s when digital hit could easily fetch $150 or more on the bay. Don’t even think about a used Leica.

But there’s a weird bubble at the end of the film era, where nobody wants those cameras. And that’s really interesting to me. I never had an SLR in college. Always wanted one, but wasn’t serious enough to drop the equivalent of a semester of tuition on a full kit. I could barely afford the hundred-dollar point-and-shoot Vivitar I bought in 1993. Now, these end-of-film-era cameras are going for cheap prices, maybe because they’re so similar to their digital counterparts.

Canon came out with the EOS 650 in 1987. (The EOS 620 came out a few months later, and added a faster shutter and some other minor improvements, despite the smaller model number.) The EOS was essentially a blank-slate start to an SLR, turning its back on the manual FD lens platform, and doing everything right the first time. Nikon was the choice of pros back then, and couldn’t turn their back on professionals who had massive investments in their existing lens system. Canon rolled the dice on this, and it was a good call.

The EOS 650 is built around the EF lens. EF stands for “Electro-Focus” and it’s an autofocus lens with no central mechanics in the camera itself. On previous systems, little gears levers or mechanical plungers were used between lenses and the body, so motors and other guts were kept in the camera itself. With an EF lens, there are seven little electrical contacts, and it’s all fly-by-wire. The lens contains any motors or electronics it needs to work. This was science fiction in 1987.

(Fun trivia: the very first image ever posted to the World Wide Web was taken with an EOS 650 and then scanned to a file. I’m not going to link to a Gizmodo story, but look it up.)

The EOS 650 (and 620) is also noteworthy because every EOS camera after it is based on the same essential design. I have the 620 and an EOS 750D sitting next to each other on my desk. The 620 is almost 30 years older, and the latter is a 24-megapixel digital camera that shoots video and has a fold-out screen. But there’s something in the basic design language that’s incredibly familiar with the two. Buttons are in the same place; the right grip feels similar; they both have a display on the upper right. The view through the viewfinder, the green aperture/shutter speed display below the image, looks almost identical. Obviously, one’s got no fold-out LCD screen and a little window that shows if the film is loaded, but they are very much from the same lineage.

The big attraction there is that the EOS 620 uses any EF lens from 1987 to present, and so do my DSLRs. I have a “nifty fifty” 50mm prime lens that I use a lot, and I slapped it on the 620, no problem. I’ve also got a nice 28-135 lens, and it works great on either.

(Minor nit: EF-S lenses made for crop-sensor APS-C digital cameras won’t work, and I’ve unfortunately got a lot of great EF-S lenses. Good news is EF lenses work great on APS-C cameras.)

(A less than minor nit: now that everyone’s going mirrorless, Canon’s introduced a new lens type called the RF. Mirrorless cameras with the RF mount can buy an optional adaptor and use their EF and EF-S lenses, but you can’t do the opposite. And there aren’t that many RF lenses yet. Also, this is the second time Canon’s tried this stunt. I have their older EOS-M, which used EF-M lenses, or an EF/EF-S adaptor. I’m not about to buy into this new system and have them change their mind a third time.)

Anyway, the EOS 620 is a strange shooting experience, because in many ways, it’s a normal shooting experience. It’s got a decent fast autofocus; a nice light meter; similar shooting modes and metering and exposure modes and all the usual stuff. Set it to P and shoot just like you would with a Canon Rebel. Swap to Tv or Av, same deal. Or shut off everything and go full manual. The one difference you’ll notice is the satisfying ca-chunk when you hit the shutter. It feels like a “real” camera.

There are some other advanced features I’d never expected in a film camera. The film loading is auto-everything, completely motorized. I guess my Vivitar point-shoot does this, but you drop in a cartridge, close the back, and it sucks in the film and tells you the frame number on the top. It’s fully motorized and fast (for the time), so you can set it on auto, hold down the shutter, and burn through three frames a second, much faster than simply lighting twenty-dollar bills on fire. And I never realized there were film cameras that did exposure bracketing, but if you want to shoot over/at/under a given exposure, set it to AEB and eat film three times as fast.

I think one thing that’s missing is there’s not any mystique or difference in the shooting experience versus using a modern DSLR. With a quirky camera like my Olympus Trip 35 or some vintage Polaroid, it’s so different from the typical experience, it’s like going from a Toyota Corolla to a Model T Ford with no roof. The 620 is like going from a 2015 Corolla to a 1995 Corolla. But try hand-cranking a Model T a few times, and you’ll see why a Corolla has its advantages. This won’t have any vintage vignetting or lens distortion like my toy cameras, but it will be nice to have something full-auto with no film loading drama involved.

Anyway, ran through a roll already, but let me do a few more and then get them off to the lab and see how it goes.

Related news: Kodak’s upping their film price by 25% in 2022. I’ve already started hoarding; I think I picked up 20 rolls since I heard that news.

 

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general

Photo book, film, rain

I have a new photo book out. It is prohibitively expensive, but was fun to do. I enjoy making photo books on Blurb, but I don’t expect to sell any of them. It’s great to do if you want a few copies to have around the house, but like I said, Blurb’s prices are a bit insane, and just got worse. If you’re really interested, it’s available here, but I won’t be offended if it sells zero copies, so no pressure.

The book started as a dumb collection of my old Hipstamatic images, taken starting in about 2010, when that app was still A Thing. Then Instagram got bought by Facebook, and it all ended for them. But there was that brief era when it was fun to take pictures that looked like ancient film snapshots. And it was at the same time that I always had an iPhone with me, and photography went from something I only did on vacations or specific photo safari missions to an activity I did any time I was wandering from point A to point B and saw something interesting. Anyway, the book started as just a dumping ground of images, but the story of Hipstamatic and my memories of it gave it a through line, and I wrote a few hundred words about it in there. Maybe I will post the text here later. I definitely am not doing an eBook version, because Blurb would probably set the minimum price at ten dollars for a 24-page PDF.

* * *

I have been doing a lot more photography lately. I’m at the point where I’m hoarding film and trying to sort and order and edit and post things here and there on Instagram. (Yes, I now use them, even though they killed off Hipstamatic.)

I don’t consider myself a great or even a good photographer. I think the best pictures I’ve taken were accidents. I mostly try to capture memories as best I can. I feel like I need to do more of it to get better, so that’s where I am with it.

And it’s a distraction. I need more distractions. I have been trying to practice bass, and take pictures. I’ve been scaling back on everything else. More on that later, maybe.

* * *

It is pouring rain outside. We got more rain today than we did from March to October. So, this is winter for us. Dark, windy, and time to dig out the full-spectrum light. The concrete walls in the garage are weeping, and it looks like some biblical miracle where people flock to a remote corner of France to see a “crying stone” or whatever. So that’s going on.

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general

Film, memoirs, rollovers

I just got back from another walk around NAS Alameda with two of my film cameras, the Vivitar point-and-shoot and the Canon QL-17. Nice weather for a walk, although there was some event going on and the west side of the island was far too busy for me. I should probably get used to that, because at some point, they’ll tear down the old barracks and put in live/work condos and it will always be this busy.

Shooting with that Vivitar is always weird, because sometimes I forget it isn’t the same one that I bought in 1993 and had back in the 90s. When I’m walking around the Bay Area with it, it’s a strong memory hole back to my first trip to California in 1996.  Looking at grainy, faded analog pictures (like the one above) reminds me so much of that trip, and the late 90s San Francisco, and it makes me wonder what it will be like in 2045, looking at 20-megapixel DSLR images on whatever crazy 3-D 200K screens we’ll be staring at by then. (Provided I still have vision in 25 years. And will still be alive.)

I made a vow to not buy any more film until I shot everything I have on hand, and I did that today, minus the 20-some shots of black-and-white still in the Canon. I’m expecting some crazy supply-chain stuff that’s going to completely throw that off, though. I haven’t bought any film since 2018, and I’m sure things have changed. I’ve got a dozen rolls waiting to be processed, so maybe when I drop those off at Mike’s Camera next weekend, I’ll see what they have in stock. Or, it’s off to eBay.

* * *

Writing is still going nowhere. This week, I was revisiting a book I started writing in 2012. I’ve tried a few times writing a book that is basically a Summer Rain prequel, that takes place in the summer of 1989, between high school and college. I’ve had at least two false starts totaling maybe 100,000 words between them, and they always die about halfway through. I started a very Raymond Federman-esque book in ’12 that was about the attempts to write this book, and the problems therein. It came from reading Double or Nothing too many times.

I thought I’d revisit it, thinking about how I look back at that era as a 50-year-old, and all of the problems I have now with nostalgia. And maybe a meditation on the need to write a memoir, and why it’s a bad idea, or has been distorted or changed in recent years. I think when I was living in that era, and a bunch of stuff happened that summer, I always thought, “this would make a great book,” because it all lined up so exactly with the traditional novel plot curve, and the events were so extraordinary or traumatic or whatever. That was before I considered myself a writer, and back then, writing a book was a giant, insurmountable goal, like climbing a mountain or running a marathon. The idea of “getting published” was such a high bar, a lofty thing, and I always thought maybe someday I would.

Now, I’ve published so many books I can never remember how many and have to look it up any time someone asks. (It’s seventeen, more or less.) Anyone can publish their own book in five minutes. And the national zeitgeist isn’t about publishing a book, because nobody even reads books anymore. It’s about going viral, making a fifteen-second video that catches on, or whatever. Old man shakes fist at air, I know.

The other main reason I need to put this down is I know I have some deep, unsettled trauma about those years. It’s not like Trauma trauma, like I watched my parents get killed after going out to a movie and had to become a crime fighter dressed as a Chiroptera. But there’s some heavy unresolved something there, something that’s best left alone. Nothing specific, just generalized. I don’t want to spend my time going back anymore. But it’s a problem that when I’m faced with a blank page and no ideas, that’s where I go.

* * *

Nothing else. I wasted about half of today trying to figure out how to roll over an IRA from Schwab to E*Trade. That place I worked in Denver got bought by McAfee a long time ago, and I had like a month of 401K stuck there, which got moved to an IRA, and they mailed everything to my old address and it got lost. After much phone tag, I found it sitting in an account at Schwab, then promptly forgot all about it. I just remembered, and 25% of it is gone because of fees. I thought transferring it would involve actually finding a fax machine in 2021, but it appears they take a PDF by email. Fingers crossed.