Quick update post, because it’s midnight and I’ve got a long week ahead of me:
2009’s kick-off month has seen me spending every moment of free time on exactly two things 1) Flickr and 2) . The amount of work I’ve put in to the latter has doubled my follower count since late December, and I hope to hit the big 1k before the end of the first quarter. Why, exactly? Coz it’s good to have goals, that’s why.
The other social media site I’ve been fussing about, Flickr, has proven to be a lot more involved. I’ve bought two cameras in the past 3 weeks — the compact, consumer-friendly Canon PowerShot G10 and the semi-professional Canon EOS 50D — in a kind of psychotic shopping frenzy that had many a friend asking me if I had some kind of aversion to having cash in the bank.
Let’s backtrack a little: The original plan (hatched roundabouts New Year’s Eve) was really to just have a good compact, and the G10 was a great playmate for the first three weeks of use. I joined Project365, faithfully uploading one photo a day to document my year. Additionally, I’ve been , which gives me something to tweet regularly about. The plan for that it is to collect everything into a book when I have all 365 photo and haikus, and publish it via Lulu. (Just so I have something physical to park coffee mugs and sticky notes on.)
** My favorite haiku, written during the Sinulog festival in Cebu goes like this: **
A painted bald man
Cackles at the human sea.
“No more room!” he says.
The problem with the G10 I suppose was that it turned out that I wanted to do a whole bunch of things that it just couldn’t pull off. That’s not to say it’s a bad camera; it’s Canon’s current flagship compact after all and I still heartily recommend it to anyone who needs a point-and-shoot that takes strong photos and has a decent set of manual controls. That said, it just wasn’t really meant to do creative photography, which is what I was most interested in. And so I got the 50D, which was to be very honest sitting at the upper limits of what I was willing to spend to be “creative,” but what the hell, we only live once. (Also, given the , it’s not as if I could really go any higher.)
At the time of this writing, I’ve spent less than 72 hours with the 50, and I can very honestly say that I’m a ways away from mastering it. I’ve taken about 5 gbs worth of photos already (about 90% of them were utter crap), and have uploaded the halfway-decent ones here. Forty-six reasonable photos out of about a thousand is not really what one would refer to a “tremendously encouraging,” but one has to start somewhere. I can feel that I’m really just scratching the surface of what this camera is capable of, and I’m excited about the fact that I will one day be able to take a photo and not have to look at the display to reassure myself that I got the exposure right. (Because Kin says the real pros don’t.)
Of the two to three thousand photos I’ve taken over the past 22 days, these are my favorites:
