Published July 2, 2005
This is one of the first few pictures I took with my new camera (see below). It was this morning, the weather was totally gloomy. I was walking along the Brussels-Charleroi canal, my purpose was to photograph the old mill they’re going to transform in a series of lofts, when I came accross this lonesome dude wearing camouflage, who was talking to the several fishing rods he had set alongside the canal. He seemed to find me as strange as I found him, and he sort of followed me while I was taking shots of the old mill. When I turned back he did the same but his dog looked somewhat fond of me and kept walking around me, that’s when I took the picture. It was pretty exciting because it’s the first on-purpose shot I’ve *ever* taken of an unknown person! I’m used to shooting industrial places, trains, forests, architecture… well pretty much anything with no people on it. So I’m very excited and I’m thinking that including people in my photographs could be very interesting and challenging. Am I beginning to relate to mankind ?
Anyway, I know the photograph itself is not very good : the sky is burned, so is the water, and I should have handled the camera horizontally (erm…). But like I said, I’m excited about it and I really like the perspective.
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Despite what I said in my last entry, I ended up getting a Canon Eos 350D – Digital Rebel XT as Canon named it for the american market, and possibly others. I figured out it would be quite dumb to spend 350 euros in a decent film scanner, plus forever developping costs, when I could buy a nice Digital SLR for, well, not-that-expensive… considering what you get for the price. I made my mind yesterday when I was having a three hours walk in town and I ran out of film, just when the most interesting subjects appeared. I got so frustrated that three hours later I was buying the 350D.
Yeah, I know I shouldn’t have.
I took the kit version with the EF-S II 18-55mm (f/3.5 – f/5.6) lens, which, as expected, is not extremely sharp, but still A LOT sharper than the thing they built my compact digicam with.
The camera itself is impressive. It’s true I’m not familiar with many different cameras, and I shouldn’t compare a DSLR with a compact digicam, but for instance : with the P&S at 200 ISO pictures became unusably noisy, whereas the Eos at 1600 ISO shows some noise but nothing worth mentionning. This is a small, but in my opinion quite significant, example to convince people who hesitate between a Compact and a SLR to go for the latter.
Oh, and I’m happy to say goodbye to the 4:3 format too!
