It’s Xmas/New Year summer holiday time.
Apart from the odd couple of days when we had a cool change, the weather has been hot, with clear blue skies, full sun and glaring light. The land is drying out and there have been bush fires along the Victorian coast of the Great Ocean Rd—–at Wye River on Xmas Day. We had planned to stay near there in February on our way back from Melbourne.
Our poodlewalks are earlier in the morning now and further afield in the afternoon. We are trying to avoid all the runners, walkers, bikers, dog walkers, families, surfers from Adelaide who have just come down to the southern Fleurieu Peninsula coast for their summer break.
I am continuing to use my APSC digital camera (a Sony NEX-7) as my everyday walkabout camera, thereby continuing my slow walk from film photography to digital imaging. My everyday walkabout camera used to be a film Leica. No more.I am not a dyed-in-the-wool Leicaphile. Sony’s NEX-7, which was Sony’s flagship camera only three years ago, is a handy, friendly, high-performance compact camera. It’s very functional for the diary-style photos on poodle walks as opposed to the art photography ones on the galleries of my website.
Even though photography sites are proliferating, the big growth period of digital camera sales is over, and camera sales are declining. Mobile phone photography is eroding the lower consumer end of the market. One reason is why carry a separate camera when the mobile phone will do? The point is that it isn’t what camera and lens you’re using, it’s more about how you learn to use it and to see with it that matters. Then it’s a matter of looking at what I’ve done—-the first pass is to work on an image, stay loose, take it easy, work fast, and don’t stress. The aim is to get it mostly right and I post-process at least a few images every day. Regularity makes for fluency.
Then, I let it “ripen”—l live with it for a while, think about it; “feel my way into it”. If the image still has power / interest / energy for me after some time has passed, that’s when I will spend the time to work on it. I start by reshooting it in film.