[Noah]

August 13, 2006 at 7:50 pm

I wouldn’t be shooting at night (not without a strong friend or three around, anyhow!), just been worried about doing the town during the day in general… I’m not a big strong guy, and it’s pretty obvious to anyone who sees me that I’m not from Ireland and don’t know my way around very well yet. I’m still thinking I may just get a small handheld camera (maybe the Coolpix P4, 8 megapixels, vibration reduction, small enough to fit in my pocket), at least until I know my way around Dublin more.

Thanks so much for the responses everyone!

[Noah]

July 17, 2006 at 6:57 pm

B&W feels far more natural and, in an odd way, real to me than colour. Both B&W and colour have expressive properties that the other doesn’t (and I’m continually trying to get a hold on colour, it really feels like a different medium than B&W photography altogether), but B&W is simply far more emotional to me. B&W peels away an aspect of everyday reality, reveals it in a more stripped-down, essential form; it has, I think, a unique ability to bypass our inner filter of how we expect the world to look and feel, to reach something more subconscious, closer to the quality of a waking dream. You automatically accept that a B&W photo isn’t “real” – you know that if you saw the same subject from the same vantage point, it wouldn?t look like it does in B&W – and yet you simultaneously recognise that it does represent a very real subject… it fosters a sense of cognitive dissonance, nudging you into a state of perception that allows you to see and feel the subject in a way that you wouldn’t/couldn’t in everyday life, no matter how familiar it may be.

Colour on the other hand is too anchored to reality to get that same effect so easily – which isn’t to say you can’t, but that the bar is set higher, as it were.

That’s my take on it, anyhow…

[Noah]

July 17, 2006 at 6:48 pm

I use a Smartdisk FlashTrax – it’s basically a portable hard drive with a screen (it can view JPEGs as well as the RAW files of many cameras, including my Canon 5D – I use the 80GB version but it comes in as little as 20GB). It fits in my backpack, I stick in one CF card and let it copy those photos off while I shoot on another, then transfer them all off to my computer when I come home… have had it for several years now, using it in wildly different environments, including the desert, and it still works great (knock wood).

[Noah]

July 7, 2006 at 5:59 pm

Mine would be my Canon 70-300mm. There’s nothing like a good telephoto zoom (for me, anyhow) to isolate subjects dramatically and pull in close to them… and it’s much sharper than the Canon 100-400mm I used to have.

[Noah]

July 7, 2006 at 12:23 am

Agreed… I think it’s not about what the camera sees, but about what *you* see. Photography’s too beautiful and powerful a thing to leave it all to the machines. =)

[Noah]

July 6, 2006 at 1:49 pm

I use a Canon 5D with the Canon 17-30mm L, 28-135mm, 100mm macro, and 70-300mm, and Photoshop CS2. No new printer yet since I moved here, but one of these days…