Hommage à ma Photographie Crappy

Vol. 1 Issue 20
Having moved up in the world of computer efficiently, but down in the world of hard dive space- my new laptop has half the hard drive space as my old one- I’ve recently been going through my pictures and rearranging them on an external HD. This means looking at pictures, almost all of them actually, that I have not looked at in years. Most of them are disappointing. I mean, the content is great, but I always thought that I could have been a decent photographer if I’d have some better gear. I’ve witnessed much of the world’s most amazing scenery, yet I have only meager images to show for it.

I’ve only ever had, and still have only one camera. It’s a seven mega-pixel, waterproof Olympus from 2006. In its day it was quite a nice camera, supposedly, I mean it wasn’t cheap. I probably took about 7000 pictures with it. They say you should be able to get 10000 out of any decent point-and-shoot. I’m bored with the camera now so I doubt I’ll ever get to the 10000 mark, unless I go traveling again. Not likely. Unless I get a better camera, then I’m going to Indonesia.

The supposed best feature of it was that it had so many build in settings so that any schmoe could take a half-decent photo. There were (and still are) these night settings on the Olympus that were potentially useful, but since it was physically impossible to hold the camera still enough to get a shot that wasn’t blurry, only about one-in-twenty night shots would come out. I have so many blurry night shots of the Sydney Opera House it’s infuriating really. One could argue that for a photo of something as iconic as the Sydney Opera house you could just as easily download a professional photo, one of postcard quality, and stop whining. Who needs their own pictures of such things when we have Google Images?

To this argument I have no retort. I actually second it. I guess if I had some great photos of the Opera house I could argue that one’s own photos, when done well, have more meaning, represent a particular time and place in one’s life, maybe, since they are not done by a professional, but by an average schmoe, (that’s me or you, assuming “you” are not a professional photag) self-taken photos of icons are a testament to the opposition of the blatant commercialization of the still image. But I don’t have any good night photos of Sydney, so I can’t argue this. Too bad.

Still, most point-and-shoots I’ve played with don’t even allow the shutter speed to be set this slow, so there was potential for good shots with my Olympus, but I guess what I needed was not a potentially good camera, but an actual good camera. Yes, the fact that I did not, and still do not have a nice camera may seem sad, heart-wrenchingly tragic even, (yes, feel free to cry, I'll wait) but I’ve had my fair share of chances to get a nicer camera yet I did not. I blew it. I was always waiting, waiting, waiting. I wanted a D90 which has always been out of my price range. I could have gotten something else and probably, since I barely know anything about the techniques of photography, all the fancy features that the expensive camera had that the cheaper one did not would not have mattered. All I really needed was any cheap SLR camera body that allowed manual adjustment with a half-decent lens. Surely I could have somehow afforded this at some point RIGHT? I live in the first freakin world. Why, just because I’m wasn’t born with the natural inclinations to operate a 1200-dollar camera should I have no any camera at all (except the one I mentioned here like 5 times already)? Why God, Why??!!

So in honor of my crappy photography I’ve decided the next few blogs following this one are going to be travel blogs, retro travel blogs, done while I am not traveling. Most descriptions and such are already like 5 years old. Since I was too crappy a writer at the time to write about my experiences, which were sometimes themselves also very crappy, this is me also relieving my guilt about not having written crappily about the crappy experiences as they were (surprise) crappilly occurring. I may even make up stories about places I’ve never even been to! That’s right, I might even lie. Just kidding, I’d never lie, not to you, my noble, dedicated, comment-writing-addicted blog readers.

A few examples of my photographic skill: Two blurry pictures of the Sydney Opera House, and a bad picture of a Wombat. It's one of my favorite animals, just FYI, for birthdays etc.