Have I told you how much I love

By Lardeau Valley Time on May 29, 2015 • ( 0 )

Have I ever told you how much I love digital photography? It wasn’t always so. But now, it’s a deep and abiding love.

Like all other photographers, when I started using a camera seriously, film was the only medium available. It was wonderful. But somewhat limiting. First, you needed to decide what film you were going to use. This was dependant on what types of photos and what results you wanted. And once the film was in the camera, it was pretty well fixed. There were fast films for sports and wildlife, rich colour films, black and white and colour films. You get the picture.

And the next decision was the size of the roll. You could use rolls of 18, 36 shots. And as you shot photos you had to remember how many shots you had left and be prepared to stop and take out the roll and put in a new roll (and not expose it to too much light) and set it up. All while knowing whatever you were shooting had continued doing what it had been doing. And in the case of wildlife, would have left by the time you were ready to start shooting again, or reverted to some mundane activity such as staring off into the sky!

But the results were known and were beautiful. And the price tag was usually enormous if you took all the photos you wanted to and hopefully the lab had done a good job of processing. Oh and did I mention, copies cost!

But when digital came along, most of us turned up our noses and became film purists. Digital wouldn’t be as good. We’d have to change all of our equipment! No way!

But as the technology changed and the prices came down, and camera cards gained memory capacity beyond 8MB, photographers started to experiment. And camera equipment companies and retailers started to aggressively prompted digital. Soon there was the fear that film would not longer be available or at least processing wold become more difficult to get. That’s when I tried digital photography.

And yesterday was a perfect example of the why I now LOVE digital. I went out in the morning, accompanied by one camera, two lenses and 2 camera cards. One has 16 GB and the other 32GB of memory! I had no real plan in mind, naturally. But decided to hit a couple of my usual spots. I found subjects there and on the way home a totally unexpected find. And I shot photos galore! In fact at the unexpected find I kept shooting until my camera said ‘No More, card filled!” or message to that effect. Quickly, I grabbed the second card (mistake not loading both cards at the beginning but who knew) and dropped it into the slot, a matter of a couple of seconds. Turned around a kept shooting. Missed nothing. Shot over 400 hundred photographs! Came home, loaded the photos onto my computer and had a ball seeing what I had captured. Probably 5-10 were not technically good enough to keep. But the rest have kept me busy sorting and enjoying. True, I didn’t ‘need’ 400 photos, but in that group were at least 20 or so shots I didn’t realize I had captured and would regret not having. Shooting action shots with a telephoto generally doesn’t give you time to pick and choose what moments to grab.

Such as these three where I didn’t realize what they were doing or that I could capture the moments.

These cinnamon teal were grabbing flies and moths as they swam along. Only the photograph showed that and with film I might not have taken the shots, not realizing what was happening. Also, I wouldn’t have been able to crop and enlarge them until I had the negatives to review.

Did I mention that I love digital photography? Join me next time to see what other photographs I got in that pile. But here is a glimpse: