Photos

Not being a professional photographer, or even a very good one, I still like getting a few good pictures from each trip to frame and hang up in my house. I've gotten at least one from every major trip going back to 2000.

My first main camera was a Canon Elan II-e. I purchased it used in New York. It was (and is) a great film camera. Quick, loaded with features, comfortable, and with great optics, it captured many great moments.

That said, for traveling light, it is a bit bulky and heavy, and that's without taking any extra lenses.

Truth be told, I might still be traveling with it save for my 2003 trip to England and France. I took about 10 rolls of film. It turns out, they were all ruined on the very first day, before even taking off. The security agent in STL insisted the film be x-rayed, despite me having put all the film in a clear plastic bag and asking for a hand inspection.

I know it was this particular scan that caused it, because the very first roll was in the camera at the time, and the frame that was exposed at that moment (frame #2 or so) had the cameras guts clearly superimposed onto the film. By the time I got to the x-ray (in London at the Eurostar) the second roll was already in the camera.

I was able to somewhat salvage a few pictures using Photoshop, but the trip's photo memories are all essentially ruined.

With even more security in place, and at places like museums as well as airports, there is no way I'm risking film again.

Now I use my Canon S50. It's not top-of-the-line anymore, but it's all I will need for the foreseeable future. While not completely compact, it will fit in a pants or jacket pocket. It's very sturdy, being mostly metal, and is packed with all the features that I'm used to with the Canon.

There's no great thought behind my photos, but I generally follow the following guidelines:

• keep it on the slowest film speed possible, in this case ISO 50. The clarity is so much more pronounced that even at night, I will make every attempt to take pics at this speed before relenting to 200 or faster. This also means taking it off full-auto mode.
• use Av (aperture priority) and adjust for the scene at hand.
  
• use the timer and lay the camera down in darker places (like cathedrals) to allow the camera to soak up the light. If it is indeed laying down or otherwise stationary, I take advantage of the steadiness to shoot the scene with the aperture closed way down, in order to get the scene in full focus.
  
• besides general good technique, I've found that holding the camera flat against my front offers a degree of steadiness that I can't get by holding it using hands and arms alone, even if braced against a wall.
• use flash fill sparingly. The flash on this camera is too direct to be of much use. My flash is off by default.
  
• get the big compact flash cards to take video...but also shoot still shots of the same scene. The video is usually too small and grainy to make lasting memories of whatever was going on.

So most pictures I've included here are at ISO-50. I did not upload metadata when I loaded the photos into flickr, so unless something is really out of the ordinary, I used that setting and Av mode.