I was bored
Jan.20, 2007, filed under Miscellany
I’ve just had to upgrade my Flickr account to a paid one (noting that I’ve had a flickr account for about a week but after several years of LJ use I’m still a scabby freeloader). The combination of having a digital camera (which means, because I don’t have to pay for it, I can snap away to my heart’s content not caring that I’ll only get 4 or 5 usable pictures out of an entire batch) and opportunity to use it has led to me becoming quite snap-happy.
We’ve had a digital camera for a while. It’s a big Fuji jobby that Frood bought a few years ago. I inherited his Minolta SLR when he bought the Fuji. I still like the SLR. There’s something about the clarity of photographs produced from film and the whole process of taking the film to be developed. It’s magical and alchemical. There is no way to tell what will come out. There isn’t the instant gratification of the digital camera, and so each print carries more of an investment — not just in monetary cost but in anticipation and care. Using an SLR has meant I’ve limited my photography. It’s big, costly, awkward to carry, eminently breakable and each shot has to be carefully chosen to make the most out of each roll of film.
We were given a Canon Ixus for our Christmas this year and I bought a 1GB memory card for it. The difference between this little baby and my Minolta is akin to drinking Jolt Cola rather than properly made espresso: both will give you a caffeine hit but the espresso requires more thought; is more elegant and sophisticated; and should be savoured to make the most of the effort.
Last night I was bored as a result of Frood going gallivanting and leaving me behind with no one to talk to except my invisible friends and the tellybox. So I spent twenty minutes taking pictures of my lava lamps. With the SLR that would have been twenty minutes setting up the tripod, working out which lens, setting the exposures and then taking 3 or 4 pictures before deciding that I’d wasted enough film in poor lighting.
With the compact digital I took more than 100 photographs and of those 100 photographs I decided only seven were worth uploading to Flickr. This must be how professional photographers feel. “It’s only film, darling!”
Talk about an instant hit.
Of course, the digital also grants the advantage of being able to dump the photos directly into PSP and start playing with them.
Isn’t technology grand? I do like my burr-mill ground, stove-top percolated SLR; but I’m rapidly coming to like the sugary fizz of the compact digital too.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
