adetorrent; photography, lifestyle.

As the year draws to a close, I have started collating the photos I will be including in the 2015 edition of my annual photobook print. I previously talked about why I do this, and why everyone should . This year has been particularly eventful for me. I've travelled quite a lot. There have been weddings, milestone birthdays, etcetera, etcetera. And as the 'guy with the camera', I've found myself shooting a lot of it, so I have many photos to choose from.  There are, however, very few photos of me. The ones that do exist are hardly printable.  Why? Well, I'm the guy with the camera. I'm always behind the camera, hardly ever in front of it.  Even more troubling is the fact that looking back, this has been the case for a long time. My friends and family can all look back fondly at the great photos of them I've captured over the years, while I'm left with occasional reflections in mirrors and shop windows, silly iPhone selfies and other such. ...

Having been predominantly shooting fully manual film cameras for a while now, I had become a little bored with my Canon 350D.  I know it can be set to fully manual as well, but for whatever reason, I just wasn't that excited about using it that much anymore.  It was too easy to use, and the kit lens is basically rubbish. To be fair though, it is quite an old DSLR (11 years or so now), so it hasn't got most of the bells and whistles present in today's cameras.  So it is sort of vintage in its own right.  Still though, there's vintage and there's vintage. Normally when I fancy a bit of instant gratification in the form of digital photography, I'd reach for my iPhone, or my Sony NEX 5n.  Having recently lost the Sony however, I've been forced to dust off the Canon.  I found an M42 adaptor and swapped out the kit lens for the Helios-44-2 ; the kit lens from my Zenit-E. What a difference it made. Sure, there was no autofocus or shutter priority...

When the iPhone 3GS was released, I could no longer resist. I had the O2 Xda smartphone running Windows Mobile - Or was it Pocket PC? Whatever it was, I made do, all the while convincing myself that I didn't need an iPhone. However, once I saw the Apple commercial featuring the voice commands - "Play songs by Kaiser Chieves!" - I drank a gallon of the apple flavoured kool-aid. The iPhone was many things apart from a phone. One of which was a capable point and shoot camera in my pocket, all the time. "Take your camera with you at all times" was no longer the mantra reserved for Lomographers and street photographers, it was for everyone, including me. Again, that online benchmark revealed the iPhone as the primary source of images uploaded. For many, it quickly replaced whatever camera they previously used. I was no exception. "Ah, I'll just leave the camera behind, I've got the iPhone". Then social networking hit the big time. Fac...

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...