$ _
- 11/4/2024 —
Dying Leaves, Dying Light
- 10/26/2024 —
Wild Wild Life
- 10/22/2024 —
One block in Chinatown
- 10/21/2024 —
Summer 2020
I've been fascinated with cameras and photography since I was a child, using my mother's Minolta point-and-shoot, later a Nikon N60 I bought with my own allowance money, then an ancient warhammer F2 my dad bought me.
I used the F2 through college, where I studied Color Photography (as in capital-A "Art Photography") with Joel Sternfeld.
After college I stuck with film because I couldn't afford a nice digital camera, but somehow film, processing, scanning, and the time to do all these things was somehow more economical (?). I got really good at this hybrid approach and still use the Canonet, Mamiya 6, Graflex 4x5 and various point-and-shoots when I'm feeling rich.
My first proper digital camera was a Ricoh GRIII, which I bought with all that extra money a lot of us seemed to have the first few months of the pandemic. It is (was) indeed an extremely nice camera, but I somehow lost it during a normal day of running errands on my bicycle a few years ago. Holy $$$h!+ Like the Mamiya, it's an excellent shooter, but quite delicate considering its luxury pricing.
As I've become more interested in riding bicycles and camping in the woods, I recently acquired an Olympus Tough WG5. It's waterproof, dustproof, and has decent and diverse optics overall. For something with a sensor size you'd find in a cell phone the IQ is very nice. Best of all it only cost me $150 used. One of the first things I did with it on my last bikepacking adventures was to take flash photo selfies of myself from under the first creek I encountered. I think it's a fine (and fun!) compromise.