adetorrent; photography, lifestyle.

It was World Photography Day the other day.  I picked the Olympus OM-1 as my camera for the day  mainly because I had recently acquired it. I had also been reading a bit about some photographers of note, such as Jane Brown , that used the OM-1. I was immediately impressed with the size of the thing - so small. I later learnt that it was indeed Olympus' intention to make an SLR smaller than all the existing ones with the giant prisms.  Sound familiar? That is almost exactly what is happening today with the Olympus OMD series. To quote the oracle in Battlestar Gallactica "A ll of this has happened before, and it will happen again ". My copy came with the beautiful Zuiko 50mm f1.8 MC (marcro) lens. I am familair with the Zuiko quality, but when the photos came out, I was blown away. In fact, I commented somewhere that Olympus should have named it the "Olympus OMG!". That's how good it is. The above photo of the minibus was taken in relative...

I walked right past it at first, but for whatever reason, I turned back and walked in. It was an exhibition of 'high quality but affordable art' in Shoreditch the other day. It was incredible.  The artists were there with their work displayed. There were all manner of art presented and for sale at very affordable prices. My eyes were drawn to paintings of 'London Waterways' by the wonderful painter Zsuzsanna Pataki . We got into conversation about her art, and she handed me a postcard.  On seeing her surname 'Pataki', I commented on it's meaning in Yoruba - " Of great Importance ".  She found it astonishing.  She's Hungarian, as is the name.  She explained to me that it's derived from 'Patak', meaning ' Creek ', and is given to people born near creeks, or from her town which derived its name from it as well. We noted how fascinating it was that she's drawn to water, as expressed in many of her paintings. ...

The world moved on. Film went out of fashion and affordable digital cameras rolled in. Film photo labs closed down all over the place. Consumer photography transitioned gradually from emulsion to silicon. Inevitably, I too stopped reaching for the film camera. One day, ten years or so ago, I placed my camera (with unfinished film) into a drawer, and simply forgot about it, till this year. There it laid, the boots 500AF, dormant, the battery slowly draining over the years, waiting for the day I'd pick it up again and snap it's positive battery contact. I quickly grew frustrated with the Nikon Coolpix 775. The image quality appeared to deteriorate over time.  The apparent loss in quality was of course relative.  It's a digital camera. Zeros and ones then, are zeros and ones now. It was in fact other people's photos that had improved. Annoyingly enough, at some point there was a sudden spike in the quality of photos on Flickr (yes yes). It was as if Earth had been inv...