My interest in Photography

This section was created on 17 Jun 2024 and last updated on 22 Jun 2024.

I have always been interested in photography. I started out at the tail end of the analogue film camera era, with point and shoot cameras back in the late 1990s. So, I could really appreciate it when we moved over to digital cameras, that gave the following advantages:

  • being able to change your ISO on the fly for each shot. With film cameras, you had to buy a file with a fixed ISO of 100, 200 or 400 to take your snapshots. You could only change the ISO when you finished the whole role of 24 or 36 shots.

  • transferring your shots immediately to the PC without having to wait to have the whole film role used and developing it at the camera shop. Developing the photos itself took about 1 day, not to mention the length of time you took to take 24 or 36 shots. So, you had to be quite careful with each photo taken, contrasting that with how you could take many digital photos at a time and easily delete the ones you didn’t want to keep.

  • including meta data in the picture itself, such as exposure details and the time the photo was taken.

Through the years, I went through compact digital point and shoot cameras such as the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W1 and Canon SX 120 IS, before deciding to get serious with the Canon G12. The Canon G12 is where I started to get a bit serious and learnt to control the exposure settings. The book “Snapshots to Great shots” really got me out of my amateur photo taking skills. And I still use this book today to go back and brush up on my photography skills. With each shot, I enjoyed manually deciding and setting the white balance, ISO level, F stop and focus points in Aperture priority mode, which I usually used. And I was so happy with the results of the photos that I took, and am still fascinated at how playing with these settings had an effect on the photo as the end result.

When the Canon G12 broke down, I then bought the Sony NEX-6 which was a compact interchangeable lens mirror-less camera, which still works in mid 2024. However, this camera is now mostly used by my wife for taking time lapse photos for the paintings that she does. It takes a photo every few seconds from the time she starts painting, and we stitch all of them together into a video that she can upload to her web site and YouTube.