Tuesday 5 January 2016

Feeding frenzy

What larks. Nikon announce two new 'flagship' cameras (FX and DX) and the fora are alive with the sound of photogeeks chewing over the specs. Oddly enough neither camera interests me beyond making one I own and want to part with likely to drop in price as the tech chasers offload their cameras (the model that replaced the one I have...). Better get it sold PDQ!

Coincidentally it's a camera I've been using recently and which still produces files I like the look of. The only things I hold against it are size and weight since getting used to my light camera. So what if it only has half the number of pixels. I've never needed all of them in any case.

Once more the internet experts have been driving me nuts. Photography is really simple these days. Cameras do so much of the heavy technical lifting for you it's easier to concentrate on making pictures. yet whenever a beginner asks a simple question that can be answered by 'put the camera in P mode to start with and learn the more technical aspects later' they get chapter and verse on the 'exposure triangle', or teh incverse square law, or hyperfocal distances or some other nonsense. All they want to know is the easiest way to get decent exposures and in focus subjects.

Then you get people offering advice on techniques they have never tried, but because they understand all the technical crap think they can help anyone. It was a query about how to improve fishing self portraits that has prompted this rant. When it comes to the technical stuff I stay away from offering advice on 'that photography forum' because I know my idiots guide approach to photography will just get shouted down. But I DO know how to take a decent trophy shot of myself holding a fish. So I posted my simple technique for success.

Even with examples of my own selfies the 'experts' continued to proffer their advice based on pure theory. In the end I couldn't take it any more and had to tell them to butt out... I should do more fishing or photography than forum watching but the weather's been off-putting. It brightened over the last couple of days but yet again a combination of work and waiting for parcels has kept me indoors. By the time I've been free it's gone dark! Still, I much prefer overcast days for vaguely landscapey subjects, but brighter ones than we've been getting of late.

The second day of the year saw me back at the reserve not photographing wildlife. The paradox of nature conservancy claiming to get people closer to nature while distancing them from it continues to intrigue me.


Look! An owl.


No comments: