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Digital V SLR...

I spent most of today copying old photos onto my laptop, so that I can eventually upload them to a photo sharing website, and inflict them on my friends and relatives back home. They want to know what I've been up to over the last 2 and a bit years.

When I first came to Thailand I had 2 cameras, an old Olympus SLR and a 4megapixel digital one. Even though the digital camera was a cheap and cheerful model (if I remember rightly it only cost around 100 pounds - around 7,000 baht 3 years ago) I spent my first three months here scared that I would lose, break or damage it. Most of the photos I had were taken with the SLR.

Nowadays, its the opposite. Wherever I travel, my digital camera goes too. Apart from a couple of weeks when I lent it out to a friend, The SLR has sat in my back of my drawer, lonely and unloved for months.

I love taking photos but I'm not that good at it. I must be the only person on earth who has an SLR camera and still manages to take photos where people's feet, arms and heads get cut off. Waterfalls where you can't see the water, and the blurred tails and backsides of animals. For someone with a good quality camera I am seriously bad.

I'm very snap happy too. I always take way too many pictures. It's almost as if using reel upon reel of film will somehow compensate for the poor quality of the images on them.

People who are into photography like to make comparisons. Which is better ? Film V digital ? SLR V digital SLR camera. I think nowadays everyone accepts that digital is better. But, looking through my old photo's, as I'm copying them over, I now think the opposite.

Digital cameras have lots of memory. Mine has a gig memory card, more if I take a spare with me. That's at least 30 or so rolls of film, and boy, do I know it. If I see anything I want to take a picture of, I do. Anything and everything. If it's seriously out of focus, the colours are wrong, or it looks really, really awful, I delete it. Otherwise it sits on my camera whilst I take another. Then another. Then another. I come back from a trip upcountry with 100 or so images, all pretty poor.

At least with a SLR you have limits. There's only so much film you can carry. You see something amazing and there's only so many shots of it that you can take. You look through your viewfinder, focus, move, look again, see if the image has improved a bit. You think about things like composition and lighting. Your image is bound to be crap if you don't. You take time to think before you hit the shutter.

There's a nerve racking couple of hours when you take your film in to be be developed. You wait to see if the photos you took are really as good as the memories you have. Whether you remembered to put the film in correctly, and whether the film wound on OK or not.

With digital there's none of this. It's a toy that lets you be careles and lazy. I rarely bend down to take a shot. I don't think I've ever used the viewfinder (though mine is a compact digital camera - not a digital SLR.) It's now covered in dust and splashes of noodle soup.

So, maybe its time to play with my SLR again, and see which is really the best.

With a digital camera- your photos can be just as bad...

Blurry sunset on Khao Tao Beach.

Beach Shot Taken with an SLR camera 2 years ago. OK its still crap (see I wasn't just being self depreciating for the sake of it when I told you how bad I am at photography) but at least there's an attempt at composition.

Beach - Koh Tao

Create Date : 19 สิงหาคม 2550

Last Update : 21 สิงหาคม 2550 0:24:21 น.

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