When we went to Tasmania last year I made myself up a little retro photography kit consisting of a half frame camera and my big old Praktica MTL-3.
Well the Praktica didn’t have the happiest trip and I was going to swap the lens to another second hand Praktica body I have, but somehow I never quite got around to swapping the lens as planned, and my retro photography kit has languished on the top shelf of my book case.
And, it has to be said, that while my little dabble with film photography has been useful – particularly the discipline of trying to compose the shot – I really havn’t seriously got into the retro photography thing. Definitely a dilletantte.
So, today I swapped out my MTL-3 with a little second hand Canon Powershot digital camera.
When I brought an old Lumix out of retirement to use at Lake View I rediscovered the advantages of a lightweight digital SLR – while I’ve an old Fuji Finepix which I use for taking high resolution images for digitisation work, in practice it’s just a little too heavy and bulky to double up as a general use camera.
It’s just that little bit too heavy to carry round in a day pack, which is why I switched to a little point and shoot Ixus, which ideal for street scenes and the like, but has the problem that in the bright light of the Australian summer the display panel is drowned out by the sun and you often end up taking the picture blind.
The obvious solution would be to use a camera with a viewfinder, such as the revived Lumix, but being an old camera, the Lumix doesn’t produce particularly high resolution images, and while they're good enough for artefact documentation, they are not so good if you need to crop and fiddle with them a bit to extract part of the image.
I’m hoping that the Canon, being relatively lightweight, and with a higher resolution image collector will bridge the gap between the two, and let me do some reasonable photography ...
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