For no real obvious reason I've added a simple over view of my photography gear to the photography section of my site.
At the moment it's just a brief list/overview of my cameras (I don't even have a picture of each one — something I need to put right). When I get more time I'll probably document some of the accessories I've got and use.
I've been using Google's custom search facility for quite some time now. I've got a custom search for all my sites, for my astronomy sites and also for my weather sites.
However, for some odd reason, all this year I've been missing the obvious handy one: a custom search for my photography. Included in this new custom search are my main photography pages, my Lincolnshire photography site, my Flickr site and my RedBubble site.
Seems to work pretty well too.
Last Saturday I took the PowerShot G9 out for its first "proper" outing. We were going shopping in Stamford so it seemed like the perfect chance to try shooting out on the streets.
I'm quite pleased with the results.
As I said previously, being small and fast to start up it's perfect for having close to hand (or, in this case, hanging around my neck) for when you see a shot that's worth grabbing. More than once I found myself faced with a shot I just "had" to "have" and the G9 was there and ready without any messing about. If I'd had the EOS 400D with me instead I'd have probably missed the shots (because, given that it's big and bulky in comparison, I tend to keep it in its case when I'm not actually taking a picture).
As I mentioned late last week, I've acquired a Canon PowerShot G9.
Ever since I got my Canon EOS 400D, and started getting addicted to photography, I've been wanting a compact camera that I could take anywhere (sometimes a dSLR is just too bulky). I also wanted one that had a good range of control (full manual mode right through to an auto-everything "I don't want to have to think" mode), felt solid and, as daft as it sounds, looked good. The G9 seems to fit all of these (the fact that it does raw files too is a bonus).
I won't even bother trying to do anything close to a review, there are plenty of those about, some of them going into great detail. I did, however, want to note my first impressions of it.
I went for a walk around our village last Sunday and took only the G9. The results can be seen over here. I found that the camera handled pretty well. The screen was easy to use in all conditions (shade and direct sunlight), the camera itself felt right in my hands, the buttons and dials are a bit on the small side for my fingers but not impossible to use (and it probably wouldn't be that good a compact camera if it wasn't very compact, right?), program-auto mode seems to cope fairly well with most situations and manual mode is a joy to use (I don't think I'd ever really thought about just how useful a live histogram would be).
Being small it's also very easy to keep to hand and the time from pressing the power button to being in a position to take a shot (assuming I've left it in program-auto) is short enough that it wouldn't be an issue in most cases.
Simply put: so far I'm very happy with it. I feel that it pretty much perfectly fits the requirement I had. It'll be nice to be able to take a camera almost everywhere with me now.
Yesterday I received the results of the first roll put through my Lomo Lubitel 166B (thanks to Tim for processing and scanning the roll) and I'm very pleased with what I see.
Given that the first roll was a bit of a rush job, done to simply test that the camera actually worked and didn't leak light like crazy and so on, I think most of the images have come out really well. There's a couple of them that really stand out for me and both of them were tests of relatively narrow depth of field:
Last Monday I took delivery of my new toy, a Lomo Lubitel 166B:
It's all Tim's fault. A few weeks back he persuaded me to run some film through my Bilora Bella 66 and, after ordering the film and then having a look around at other medium format cameras, and seeing that the 166 is often suggested as a fun entry to medium format photography (not to mention the fact that Tim used to shoot with a Lubitel too), I couldn't resist getting hold of one.
