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razor granny and digital photography

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Today as I cycled up the hill on our street to start my forty-minute cycle commute, the first person I met was a granny on a "razor".

Pretty cool! She was a slight little thing and the child's scooter suited her well. I hope she negotiated the street's steep slope in safety.

One thing I regret about carrying an essentially disposable set of street photography gear around with me is that due to its full-size film SLR nature, it's a little cumbersome to pull out in a flash.

Having nearly lost my digital SLR recently, I had a good think about what I use that camera for and realized that it's: not much. I've essentially been forcing myself to use it by taking on photo challenges where I'd have to post every day. But its weight, its bulk, and its slow speed (I use it with manual-focus lenses and have to do a two-step process if I want to get a properly-exposed image) mean that it's considerably less useful for the sort of photography I do every day than even the film gear is. I never take it on trips, either, that's always my (slightly) better film gear. So .. what am I doing?

Last night I stopped in at a camera store to have a look at a Samsung NX11, which is a hybrid of point-and-shoot and DSLR. It gives me the same size sensor as is in my current DSLR, but is a fraction of the weight and size. It comes with an electronic viewfinder that I found .. pretty lousy, actually. This sort of thing evidently isn't for me. But I think something small and still retaining the large sensor size might be a very welcome change from lugging around increasingly-outdated film gear and a bulky and un-fun digital SLR.