Farmer's Market

[arcana_mundi]

I got my butt in gear and went out to the market to see if there were honeydew melons out yet. Nope. Nothing but beets and meats. But I did get some good photos.

I really like the photography. I think I'm pretty good at it. I wish I'd figured that out sooner. Of course, I think I would have been fairly BAD at photography back when that required

Comments

[intertext]

Yeah, if you can swing it, the best of both worlds is to have both. I'm loving my Powershot, but wouldn't want to give up my SLR. You're right, the processing speed really makes a difference, and it's nice to be able to shoot RAW, for the flexibility it gives you in post-processing. For really important shoots, I would still probably want to have my Rebel (and I'm lusting after the Canon D40 mark II). If you're going to have one that you can try out without having to pay for it up front, that's great, because then you'll be able to see exactly what you can do with it.

I shoot almost entirely on Aperture-priority except when shooting birds, when I use Shutter priority. My P&S has a somewhat limited range of apertures, which is my only serious frustration with it.

My P&S (it's a Canon Powershot SX10 IS) is also not that much smaller than my Rebel, but having something like 25-500 zoom means that I can carry just it rather than my Rebel and lenses. I have an 18-250 zoom for my Rebel, but find that I lose a lot of pictures to camera shake without a tripod, even though it's quite light weight). I'm aiming to invest in a 170 macro and a 300 and an 18, plus the 60 macro that I already have and then, several thousand dollars later, I'll have all the lenses I want. Then I'll get a new body :-) Ah, the joys of spending vast amounts of money on camera equipment...

I'm actually still undecided about what camera to take on my very soon upcoming trip to England and Venice. The plan is the P&S, but how much do you want to bet that I break down and take both??

[arcana_mundi]

The slippery slope of equipment investment/lust is another thing I was hoping to avoid for a long time - I wish TPTB would make an ultrazoom with a nice big sensor.

I think the Powershots are nice ultrazooms. I went with the Lumix because it had better reviews across the board, but it sounds like you're a Canon loyalist - I know that photographers do tend to cleave strongly to Canon or Nikon (eccentrics to other brands) and rarely stray once decided. I'm still relatively "Undecided" in that partisan battle.

I would hazard a guess that part of the shake issues stem from shooting with aperture priority sans tripod? If you're traveling without a tripod/monopd/etc. maybe you could experiment with a faster shutter to cut down on some of that blur and/or adjust for exposure from RAW?

Also - have you tried a wrist grip for the Rebel? A wrist grip made a HUGE difference for me. I couldn't find one that fit the FZ-28 body properly though, so I ended up figuring out how to winch the neck strap around my wrist (and in very dim light, I do the figure-8 "death grip" wrapping the strap from the wrist to the elbow) and that helped a lot. I do think that the softness that I almost invariably end up with is because of the wee sensor rather than shake. Could be wrong. Will know soon!

My .02 would be to take both. I think that you'll miss the DSLR on some days and not on others. Days of casual sightseeing, drop the Powershot in the bag. But if you want to do some centrally photographic expeditions - out to Burano, or the cemetery island, or to see the beautiful ruinations of Lido, etc. etc., or to spend an afternoon shooting faces in San Marco... You'll wish you had that marvelous DSLR, I betcha. I know that I experience regrets sometimes. I'm sure I'd have more tack sharp pictures of exceptional moments if I'd had a bigger sensor and faster capture. All of my photos will print up fine for large snapshots, but 8x10 and larger? Not all of them. Not nearly. And some of my most favorite and really gorgeous ones. The stars have to have been unbelievably perfectly aligned on all accounts to have a shot at anything bigger than 8x10. It just is what it is - no matter how many megapixels a camera has, if the sensor is small, that picture just isn't going to be printable in larger formats. Not enough information. Sigh. Things I know now that I wished I'd known then!

My other thing that I'd recommend (and you may already have this) is to have cards made. I bought MOO minicards, and I can't imagine doing street photography without them now. Being able to give subjects a link to the upload site (Flickr) where they can download copies for themselves generates a lot of goodwill, and it can defuse tension with someone who seems uncomfortable if they catch you at it, and it just makes people happy. 95% of the time I shoot first (or at least until they notice me + seem uncomfortable) and then give the card, but in the case of taking pictures of children I nearly always ask first, unless it would break the spell and I can be discreet enough not to freak out any parents. Sometimes I hear from subjects later, or notice from traffic that they've been in and/or have sent friends, and I like that a lot. Sometimes they don't. I asked a mother if I could take a picture of her baby and got this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/arcanamundi/3393225090/

I can tell from statistical traffic data (it's been viewed three times - three! and I know that's one by my mom, one by my sister-in-law, and one by my Uncle Mike - the only people who ever look at all the pictures that go up) that she's never been in to see it, and that seems a terrible pity to me. It's just about the best baby picture in the history of humankind on account of that being the cutest baby in the world. When I asked her if I could take it she looked bored and slightly put out. Oh well.

The pictures that I got at that market in Paris were, I'm sure, infinitely better (and more in volume) because I could politely hand people my card and ask permission to photograph their booth/stuff/persons. I know this because once I ran out of cards, my life got harder.

In the end I think it's just a nice give and take between the photographer and the street subject.

[intertext]

You could well be right about the aperture priority/camera shake equation. Duh. Never thought of that!

I have some of those Moo cards, for precisely the reason you articulate, and you remind me to add them to my "to pack" list!! I might well have forgotten, and regretted it.

And yeah, I think I may well break down and take the whole gamut - I'm bound to regret it otherwise. I have a wonderful camera/laptop case backpack that will pass for hand luggage - I used it when I went to Paris. That, plus one fairly small bag on wheels and an expedition bag is all I'll take, and if I can put my P&S in the bag and my Rebel in the backpack, that's what I'll do. I wouldn't hesitate, except that I'm moving around a lot (London > Italy > Bath > Bristol > Penzance) and really do want to travel as lightly as possible. However...

I'm actually an Olympus loyalist. My first SLR was an Olympus OM1 film camera, and my first digicam was an Olympus. My second SLR was a film Rebel (bought for automation, because my OM1 is fully manual - I still have it!), so when the time came to buy a DSLR, I already had the lenses. And Olympus has yet to bring out a DSLR that is rated as highly as either Canon or Nikon. When I bought this P&S I meant to buy an Olympus one, but the Canon had better features for less money.

[arcana_mundi]

The whole gamut will be a pain to tote, no mistake. But you're a photographer. It's what you do.

Olympus loyalist! That I think is probably the next most popular after Nikon and Canon, right? In my head it goes Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, and then - for the true esotericist/original gangsta - Leica. It does seem to kind of be mostly related to "What brand was the first camera you ever bought" type thing. I'd love to be a Leica girl, all strange and edgy with the sleek black box of an M8 and the razor-sharp reflexes and major skillz to go with it, but what can I do. I went with the Lumix, which has Leica glass. I don't know how well Panasonics do in other market segments, but it was the best reviewed ultrazoom out there when I bought mine. Kind of weird, because other than that... Maybe I'll be a Panasonic loyalist. But I'm still heavily inclined toward Nikons based on the (ridiculous quantities) of reading I've done about the prosumer DSLRs. I kind of enjoyed reading the heated flamewars on discussion boards that I was lurking on. Nikon v. Canon seems like the Pirates v. Ninjas of photography nuts.