Havers and Blethers

Photography

The pages containing the pictures have been left mostly free of technical discussion. In this section I'll talk a bit about photography as I used to do it, and about today's digital photography.

My Early Days

I got my first proper SLR camera in 1976. It's still in use and was used in Switzerland in 1998.  I soon joined the Edinburgh Photographic Society in Great King Street. I used my attic as a darkroom and created black and white prints up to 16 by 20 inches with my Durst enlarger. The camera is a Yashica TL Electro and cost £91.35, quite a lot of money in 1976.

I persevered with this camera, firstly because it was adequate for my needs, and secondly because I soon amassed a collection of lenses from 17mm ultra-wide to 350mm telephoto. I dabbled with colour-printing but soon reverted to monochrome. The competitive spirit in the Edinburgh Photographic Society and the criticisms of fellow photographers helped to improve my pictures.

Video Camera

I finally got a camcorder in 1997. Although advances are rapid these days, I'm still more than pleased with its features and performance. It's a JVC GR-DV1 which uses mini DV tapes. It has no flip-out screen but a miniature screen (inside the viewfinder) which works better in sunlight, and doesn't gobble batteries. It doesn't have digital-out - but that's not a problem.

If you're considering digital photography, be aware that the low resolution of video will mean that any stills you might grab will only look reasonable at 500 x 400 pixels or smaller. TV pictures can look sharp at normal viewing distance because they're moving; even static TV images are 'sort-of' interpolated across time, to my way of thinking.

Digital Still Photography

If you're content to display your photos on computer monitors then the quality available is pretty good now. Minimum requirements are a 'mega-pixel' CCD and a decent lens. Once I'd downloaded a few sample shots from the Internet, I knew that the Nikon Coolpix 900 would meet my requirements.

The benefits of digital technology are significant:

• Instant results, no need to hand your film into the chemist.

• No need to buy film.

• Photograph anything you want without some Boot's technician deciding whether to report you to the authorities.

• No worries about wasting film - encourages you to experiment more.

There are some disadvantages, e.g. initial cost, and you don't have pictures you can pass round. You can get special printers of course but running costs may be high. I'll wait until the technology gets better and cheaper.

The Nikon uses Compact Flash memory cards and comes with a 4MB card. A 20MB card can hold about 80 pictures at the normal level of JPEG compression, and the default resolution of 1280 x 960 pixels. If you were going away, you'd need more cards or some other method of storing lots of images. A laptop PC is one method - but other devices are appearing which consist of little more than a 2.5 inch hard disk and a serial port.

The serial port method of downloading images from the camera to the computer is the default - but a Compact Flash memory card reader is infinitely faster, if more expensive. For more information, check out the magazines or the Internet.

http://www.steves-digicams.com/diginews.html or the Usenet group rec.photo.digital are good places to look.