Ripples

Coffee gallery

I'm something of a coffee addict. At work, I only drink water (the stuff produced by the coffee vending machines is no good). But before, between and after hours, I can often be found in the neighbourhood enjoying a good cup of coffee.

So I thought it would be a nice idea to kick off my new Canon Powershot A95 by doing a little project, photographing my coffee cups at a series of different locations. The tilting LCD screen is a great help in doing this: it allows me to position the camera like I want without the need for all kinds of contortions to check the framing. This was really a feature I wanted.

The first pictures resulting of this project can be found in my first online gallery, appropriately called Coffee Gallery. I intend to keep adding pictures from time to time, and maybe replace some initial ones with more successful examples. For now, I've put aside any critical sense and just put up what I had. So come back later, and maybe more and better pictures await you. I don't know if they'll mean anything to you, but for me it's just a bit of plain fun...

Powershot

In a surprising move (even to myself) I've recently bought my first digital camera. For a long time I convinced myself that I'd wait until perceived quality and prices felt just right (meaning comparable quality and prices to analog gear).

Some time ago, I almost went for the Konica-Minolta A2, as this seemed a good photographers camera at a price that was about approachable. But I decided to wait until I could have it a bit cheaper, and now it's already superseded by the A200, which doesn't appeal to me.

Then, when we learned that my beloved is pregnant, I thought this might be the right time to go for it. I put all my hopes in the Canon EOS 20D, which is indeed a very good camera. Not cheap, mind you, but as far as DSLRs go it seemed a good buy. Until I got around to calculating how many films I could shoot, have developed ànd printed for the acquisition price of the 20D... Something like three 36 exposure films a day for an entire year! So again I decided it wasn't worth it. Just for the added convenience of immediate availability, this was a bit expensive.

But somewhere the desire to try this new thing out lingered. So finally, after reading lots of reviews (which I do anyway, as I read several photography magazines regularly) I found that the Canon Powershot A95 seemed to be a good compromise for price, quality, photographic possibilities (not for me the automatic-only things or ultra-small jewel cameras). Somewhere it was described as the "G5 killer", and the G5 was considered as quite a good camera (but it, and its successor the G6, cost double of the A95).

So now I'm working through the (quite extensive) manual, trying to find my way around this new gadget, and finding out how it can fit in with all my other photographic gear. It certainly won't be my main camera, but I can already imagine some nice uses for it. Maybe the appearance of this blog will soon change as a consequence of my purchase...