Be careful of what you read on the internet. This page included! I recently read a photography article, I forget where, where the author stated that taking photographs of anything other than people is pointless. People on the streets, to boot. Of course, this was coming from one of the self-proclaimed "street photographers", but I did agree with some of the essence of the article. The author's point was, that taking a photo of a sunset or a flower is pointless, as anyone could do that and it could be from any decade (well, not so commonly pre 1900 of course), and that photos of people going about their daily lives are the only worthwhile photos—photos which are useful to future generations as archive material, and photos which we can date almost instantly. I do agree that I can easily say "that's a film photograph, from the 1980s, somewhere in the UK". I can do this because of clothing, hairstyles, car registration plates, signs, buildings, and a few other key attributes. Photos of people taking selfies? Rather recent, I fear. Does this make a photo of a flower worthless? I don't think so. And I'm not going to be putting photos of average joe wearing ill-fitting t-shirts and jeans on my walls. No sir.
What have I noticed recently? That I am taking fewer photos. That's obvious, as my last post was quite a while ago. When I was in Japan, I always had my camera with me, and Japan is a more photogenic place than the UK. It's not just that it's different. It's cleaner, has better year-round sunlight, and the people dress better and tolerate photography. I drive to work now, so I can't operate a camera at the same time (though I might put a video or two filmed from my car on the website at a later date… why the hell not). Sometimes even if the weather is nice in the UK, I simply don't find anything worth photographing. So I leave all my gear at home. This does mean that I end up taking the odd photo with my phone (OnePlus One), and have noticed the camera isn't as good as I would like, so I am considering the iPhone SE. Thing is, even when I had my RX1 with me the other day here in Vienna, I still took what I see as a better photograph with my phone.
Can you tell which is which?
And which do you prefer? I'll be interested to see how those two things tally up.
Thing is, if I ever want to print anything, and I do, then the larger sensor and better optics "win" every time. It then comes down to post processing, which just takes a little more time than doing the same on your phone. Next idea would be to actually edit on the phone, but depending on the software, this might mean you have a tiny resultant image and you are back to square one.
Another reason I am not taking many photos, is that we're renovating our house at the moment. This takes a lot of time. I don't currently have my computer properly set up to edit photos, so I am making do on a small laptop. One day I will have a better setup, but until then, you'll have to bear with me. Also, I might show photos of the house project on this site as things come together.
This trip to Vienna is the first conference trip of what looks like a busy year ahead. I've been here many times before, but that doesn't hamper my enjoyment one bit.
Having not used a camera for a while, it been good fun. I've not forgotten my style, and probably the only thing I'd forgotten was the quality of the full frame sensor. Viewed large, there's a depth to these images that a mobile phone cannot reproduce. So it does tell me that I shouldn't call it a day quite yet.
"Yeah, that's right, two horse power"
All photos taken with RX1, except for the one that's a mobile phone picture ;-)