Yes. Believe it or not, as technology savvy as I like to think I am, I have never actually owned a digital camera. When digital cameras first hit the consumer market — they were indeed: very expensive, had 5 minutes battery life, and shot at the resolution of analogue tv.
Fast-forward to now, and these are no longer reasons to put off buying one. In fact, as I'm sure your probably aware, (at time of writing) you can now pick up a fairly full-featured point & shoot, which will deliver, more than sufficient quality photos, for around the £60 mark! (roughly $100.)
Last year from early May to mid July, I was fortunate enough to be able to tag alongside my younger brother on a world trip that he had planned out for his gap year. He brought his digital camera, a Sony DSC-H3, which he purchased nearly 2 years ago now, for around £200. This is really when I decided I needed to get myself a camera.
I was suprised to see the kind of images he was getting from it, and this really is a "budget" camera by todays standards at least. Whilst arguably, he could have done with a couple more than the 8.1 megapixels provided (for cropping purposes,) the colours looked great, there was strong contrast between them, and when pushed, the camera could produce some depth to the photographs.
So what's my point? Nothing profound I'm afraid. It's simply that, I believe, we're finally at the stage where, not only are digital cameras extremely affordable, but for most amateur photographers, any camera they choose to buy, is guaranteed to deliver both a respectable battery life, and plenty of megapixels.
Consumers in the market for a lower-end digital camera, can now shrink down their list of buying considerations, and focus, (if you'll pardon the pun) on what are ultimately more important features. These are things like quality of lens. Of course you don't want your camera to die at that important moment, nor do you want to be left with so few pixels that your photos look like impressionist art. Still, as deceiving and confusing as the megapixel myth is for many people, neither of these two factors have any affect on actual picture quality. This is why it's nice to be able to forget about such issues and worry about taking good photographs, photographs that we're lucky will last a hell of a lot longer than a piece of celluloid.
If these photos below, are the kind of images you can get with a budget point and shoot, I am certainly excited for the possibilities of one day owning a DSLR.
For now though, I will keep an eye out for something in the lower to mid price range, as I know I will still be able to capture some great photos. Any recommendations would be awesome, so please post a comment or hit-me-up on twitter.
For several years now I've had the intention of setting up my own website, or a blog, a something. You see that's just it, I've always wanted my own space on the web, away from the facebooks and myspaces, something unique. I have however, not been able to decide exactly what it should be, or indeed, how I should go about it.
I think one of my problems is I'm somewhat obsessive-compulsive; if I create or work on something, it usually has to be perfect (for me at least,) the best of the best, and finalized. I always have to do my research, to find the right methods, the best product, or the best platform in this case. Well, at least that's what I always strive to do. There's aiming for perfection, and then actually achieving perfection, and I can't honestly say I've ever really done the later. Still, I try, and it takes me forever to get nothing done...
On with my quest: Now for arguments sake, let’s forget the idea of a full website and declare that I want to start a blog.
Well then. Eventually, here it is.
This is my first 'real' post, a written entry, not a picture or a video embed. You see, with my short attention span, along with some chronic laziness, I seldom ever read anything, never mind get down to writing; In fact, I'm shocking myself right now as I type, but I guess that’s a whole other post that you might not be too interested in.
So, which is the best platform out there? I’d say you can't define just one.
Ok, as you may have noticed, this is just a cheap-simple little posterous site (no offence posterous.) Am I then, not contradicting myself with all this talk of perfection, finding and creating the best of the best? Yes I am, please allow me to explain: You see I finally decided to just post something, on any old thing. I gave up in other words. I went against all my weird values and said-"screw it, life's too short, I'll start blogging, today!" Well that’s roughly what happened anyway.
In my search for the perfect blogging platform, I discovered that it's all really dependant on exactly what you want to do: how much free time you have, how serious you are about it, how much patients you have, what kind of skill set you have, how much money you have, and many other factors.
Here are some of the reasons why I stopped searching and started blogging:
There are two more reasons I’d like to cover. To clarify though, these are just as much future options as they are reasons for taking the easy blogging route, as I have done thus far:
So there you have it: hopefully you've got an understanding of why I chose to give up searching for the definitive blogging platform, and why this is not an ‘über chic’ web designer style blog. I'm not a web designer after all. I do think the simple, clean, and clutter free look has a lot going for it though.
Having explained some of my reasoning, it may be apparent that I still had to choose a platform in the end. You may be looking for answers as to why I went straight to posterous?
Its pretty simple really: Posterous is a stripped down and simplified blogging platform which cuts out all the unnecessary options that you will find elsewhere. They win you over right from the start by making the process of setting-up an account so outstandingly easy and simple; in-fact, as their homepage suggests, they really do cut this step out entirely. In addition to this unrivalled simplicity, they prove to be the most generous blogging platform out there. Not only do they offer a free-hosted blog, as many other competitors do, but they allow you to host your own domain; something I feel I may want to do in the future. They also host my twitter photos, videos, mp3s; you name it, with no silly plug-ins required to bog down the site. I can literally post to this blog from anywhere, just by sending a simple email from my iPhone, or any device for that matter.
I should mention that I’m aware tumblr also offer custom-domain handling. However, for a company who are happy with their ‘micro-blogging’ label, they provide so may options and themes, it seems they're trying to become the new WordPress. In contrast to this, posterous is so stripped down for example, that your auto-post links double as social-media icons on your page!
Despite tumblr's extra options, it doesn’t feel like a “real” blog. With its 're-tweet' reminiscent 're-blogging' feature, along with ‘follow’ buttons, I believe tumblr belongs in the social-media category as another sharing tool; developed to work intrinsically. Albeit it an excellent and unarguably very popular one.
You could argue that blogging is all about sharing, and I would agree. It does however, also happen to be a form of publishing. I personally find posterous to be less of a social-aggregating tool as tumblr is, and more of an open blogging platform for pushing out fresh-original content.
In the future, I look forward to creating some more posts, and sharing this blog with anyone and everyone. My plans are to eventually move onto something a little more advanced, and to continue working on my WordPress site. I am currently awaiting the release of Thesis 1.7 for WordPress, as Chris Pearson of DIYthemes has promised big improvements, making it even more intuitive to work with.
Thesis, is something rather unique, it is a fully optimized framework for WordPress, as opposed to a just a theme. I am certainly a big fan of Thesis and all the work Chris is doing, the support on the Thesis forums was phenomenal! So watch this space, this blog may have a new home over on WordPress in the near future. Or maybe squarespace, oh no! I’m back at it again..
I shall end with a Springer-esque final thought: You may have found this post useless; I wouldn't be offended if you have. Hopefully though, if anything, this has inspired you to do what I am doing right now, and enjoy yourself on the web. We are living in such exciting times, the Internet is ever changing, so keep abreast, take advantage of the latest developments, and explore them. I realize that expressing one's thoughts and opinions in a simple little web-log is just the beginning, but everyone has to start somewhere. Happy blogging!
