December 4th - 10th 2006
Sunday Squinting
Saturday Vauxhall
Friday Snap judgement
Thursday Vauxhall
Wednesday Photographic recall
Tuesday Vauxhall
Monday Many returns
Sunday 10th December
Pixmania listed the D80 body as 'in stock'; the 18-200mm lens, it claimed, would be available in a few days time, a claim which, given the lens's known popularity, I already had reason to doubt and which, indeed, following a pleasant yet distinctly non-committal phone-call, I hardly bothered to take seriously at all.
Nonetheless, given Pixmania's keen prices (£500 for the D80 versus £700 list), I decided to treat their assurances at face value, order both, and hope that both arrived.
A day or so later, the D80 body arrived - and the claimed availability of the lens shifted forward a week.
Frustratingly, there's not much you can do with an SLR camera body with no lens attached, short of getting accustomed to feel of it in your hand - substantial - and marvelling at the range of knobs and switches - mind-boggling.
The manual helped to explain some of the twenty-four separate control mechanisms - or would have, if it has been in English. The price you pay for Pixmania's prices is that the printed manuals come in French, for some reason.
Having inserted the carte mémoire in its volet du logement, and adjusted the réglage dioptrique, I found myself with not much else to do except squint through the oculaire de viseur, and fail to be impressed by the misty vista that is all you can see when there's no damn lens on the camera.
One potential disappointment, thankfully, I'd learnt to anticipate in advance: for what are, on reflection [pun intended], perfectly sound reasons you don't get any kind of image preview on an SLR. (You wanna see what you're snapping, you look through the viewfinder, doh.) (Assuming you have a lens, double doh.)
One thing I could play with, and did, was the extensive menus offered on the 2.5" monitor; it was here, I think, that I first appreciated that the D80 offers the equivalent of film speeds up ISO 3200.
Mmm, want some of that. Want some of that NOW.
Saturday 9th December
Vauxhall, Autumn 2006
Friday 8th December
Having decided to move things up a notch or two photographically, my quest for a new camera followed the time-honoured path: look critically at current and future financial constraints, decide on a budget, scout out a range of equipment to fit the budget, seek out reviews and tests, raise budget, read more, put the whole thing on hold for a while, raise budget further, narrow options down to two or three, contemplate spending cash on extended holiday instead, and then stick pin in list.
Of the only three brands worth considering if you're looking to spend over £500 on a camera, I was originally inclined to Olympus (because those were the SLRs I'd known and used through the eighties - largely because they sponsored the professional photographer with whom I was professionally associated, and it was not unknown for equipment to fall of the back of the lorry in my direction).
But, impressed though I was by Olympus's technological wiliness (and impressed still further by my experience of the Mju), I couldn't quite shake my long-held conviction/superstition that Olympus's Zuiko lenses lacked a certain punch.
And this time round I definitely wanted some bang for my buck.
Given my increasing obsession with camera-shake, developments in image-stabilisation began to interest me rather more than optics or other quality issues (if the images you eventually produce will only ever be seen on the web, it's hard to convince yourself that there are any meaningful differences in image quality above a certain spend).
Nikon's policy of building its anti-vibration technology into the lens rather than the camera body was what finally swung me away from Olympus, and I found myself more and more taken by their new D80: a relatively compact body, 10 million pixel resolution, all the manual control you could possibly want plus a selection of automatic 'vari-programs' - very handy for when you're too drunk to shoot straight.
The deciding factor was the reviews their new AF-S DX VR 18-200mm lens was getting in the camera press: ten out of ten in most cases, with one editor admitting that he'd personally ordered one without even seeing it, and had not regretted it for a moment, even though he'd had to wait six months for it to arrive.
And thus it was that, raising my budget one last time (or so I thought), I braced myself and laid out slightly over a grand at Pixmania.
Thursday 7th December
Vauxhall, Autumn 2006
Wednesday 6th December
I made my long-delayed return to photography, with my first digital camera, on 15th June 2005.
Having been nowhere near a camera for almost ten years, the idea was to buy something relatively cheap and spend some time putting it through its paces, aiming to get a grip on how photography had been affected by the digital revolution, and whether it was still something I would find worthwhile.
The camera I eventually selected, the little Olympus Mju, provided several revelations. I'd chosen it for its looks as much as its performance, figuring that if cameras were turning into personal accessories, they might as well be nice to look at, as well as with.
Technically, it was astonishing, largely because it offered so much in such a little package: highly-intelligent point-and-shoot in something you could comfortably tote in your trouser pocket.
The Mju's build-quality proved not entirely equal to the cavalier treatment I doled out. The horizontally retracting lens-cover, a pleasurable thing in its own right, relied on some super-fine tolerances to fit into that tiny package, and just a couple of knocks were enough to demoralise it, after which I found myself having to encourage it closed with a gentle thwack on the wrist. (It also stuck entirely a few times, a potentially disastrous situation from which a kind friend with a set of jeweller's screwdrivers rescued me.)
As well as being highly portable, the Mju proved very discreet. As one of nature's sneaky bastards, I sometimes doubt that I'll ever have the courage and/or energy to directly request people's likenesses, preferring merely to steal them, either overtly or covertly; a small black camera provides invaluable assistance in that regard.
I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the photographs I produced. I had always found Olympus lenses a little soft for my taste, and I had no high expectations in terms of contrast or pin-sharp focus.
In the event, and given that I was only ever going to reproduce the results on a web-site rather than in print, the Mju's optics and 4meg resolution proved perfectly satisfactory - surprisingly so given that my necropolitan lifestyle militates against the kind of full-sunlight shot for which this type of camera is designed.
Colours came across quite well - though I did feel a twinge of nostalgia for the inbuilt hue-biases of old-style film, where you could choose Fuji for good greens or Kodachrome64 for beach-ball brilliance.
The Mju's ability to select a white-balance to match the light-source proved invaluable, though I found myself using it less than you might expect, given most of my pictures were taken by artificial light (I like that orange warmth, what can I tell you?)
Its failings, to my mind, were those you'd expect from a mass-market gadget constructed for people who don't know an f-stop from a hole in the ground.
The flash is frankly pitiful, designed to light six drunken secretaries at a hen-night but little more. The focal-length of the lens, deliberately defaulting to a very wide-angle so that the punter gets everything, and everything's in focus, took a little getting used to. And zooming in, either manually or digitally, was rarely worth the effort, providing only limited flexibility at a substantial cost in quality.
Whilst I appreciated the lightness of the Mju in terms of its pocketability, I began to suspect that I was paying a price for that in terms of the steadiness of my shots - although (given the recent Cunningham experience) I'm all to aware that that may merely reflect my own declining motor skills.
The lack of any kind of control over shutter speed or aperture was the most obvious challenge, though the cunning use of one or other of the pre-set program-modes coupled with exposure compensation and film-speed equivalents could get you through most situations.
Plus, of course, it wasn't an SLR. No viewfinder? Crumbs. On the other hand, you do get to see whatever you're pointing at, bright and wide, in the preview screen on the back of the camera, a design revolution that has probably produced the single most basic change to the way that most people think of photography these days: time was, a camera was a magic box you held to your eye; now it's an icon or a sceptre, held carefully away from the face at a safe distance.
I'm guessing that hardly anybody bothers to frame a shot in-camera these days. Why bother when every image you produce is going to go through Photoshop before it meets its public? Just shove your arm out and click away: click, click, click.
And that, of course, is the single most important difference that digital imaging brings to making photographs: if in doubt, just take more shots.
With film-based technologies, you were paying a not insubstantial sum every time you pressed the button.
Despite the hoary advice from professionals to "treat film as if it were free", it was always difficult for the rest of us to resist the temptation to try and make every shot count. And that, in turn, meant many a missed opportunity, image after image vanishing before your eyes as you struggled to choose The Decisive Moment.
Now everyone gets to work on the equivalent of a contact-sheet and, for those of us (a minority, of course) who care about the quality of the images they produce, the emphasis has shifted from capture to selection.
I have approximately 4,000 photographs held in iPhoto. Assuming that I've deleted, what?, four snaps for every one I've held on to, that means I've used the Mju to create something like 20,000 images in eighteen months.
Time to move on.
Tuesday 5th December
Vauxhall, Autumn 2006
Monday 4th December
(Six years old, and still running late.)
......previous week
