Singularity in The irresistible Urge To Play with Light

I've been taking photos regularly for close to a decade; as I said, when I got my hands on my first digital camera, I took this:

Fig 1

and that started me on a kick of wandering around with the camera in hand, snapshotting whatever I found interesting.

Fastforward five years, and I found myself confronting a Canon Eos, with no idea how to use it.

I'd been "out" of photography for a while at that point-- I'd been using a Casio Exilim and that was kinda slow to boot up, and I'd spent a lot of time doing video instead-- and I guess I came to the conclusion that this stuff wasn't for me.

Then I went back into cosplay, with said Exilim and my handphone, because the Exilim just took too long to boot and didn't give me much better images, and I started shooting again.

And then I broke my camera.

I decided to get a more rugged one this time, and it so happened that the mirrorless market was kicking off, and I got my hands on an Olympus EP-3 that was going comparatively cheap because the next generation of cameras was coming along, and suddenly I had a reasonably powerful camera that could go wherever I went and see whatever I saw.

At least, it did that once I figured out the basics of what the camera did.

I've upgraded since then, first getting new lenses for the EP-3, and then switching those lenses to an EM-5. I've bought a proper camera bag, I've used tripods and homebuilt reflectors and hot lights and fill flashes and I've used my camera as a telescope and even learnt how to play around with postprocessing.

Fig 2

It's been two years since I first shot an Olympus Pen and fell in love with Micro 4 3, and I've developed my skills as a photographer, but I've not lost the habit of simply walking with the camera to see what I can see; rather, the format is small enough that I can do this, and hefty enough that people treat my photography with some little respect, and assume that when I'm in public I'm an artist going about my work.

It's been two years since I've started learning how to dive deeper into the heart and code of a photograph, and now I can do this:

Fig 3

I couldn't have seen that; I literally could not have known that I'd be capable of this without knowing that I would buy a system camera, or that I would be able to dive so deep into its settings.

Let's see what the next two years bring.

Fig 1: Manchester from Burlington Towers, 13th floor. Full album here.

Fig 2: My old Olympus EP3 on the right, with my new Olympus OMD EM5 on the left. Identical lenses. The weathersealed lens that goes with the EM5 is behind them both.

Fig 3: Blue-collared kingfisher at Marina Barrage. Full album here

Last updated August 17, 2014