I haven’t written much here lately. Not for bad reasons, just been busy making the most of summer and that is in some respects why I am updating my blog on Saturday afternoon – I have been out and about so much that my flat has turned into a dump! So I’m having a day of cleaning up, mopping, hoovering – everything. Later on today I’ll be off out to take a photo of a subject I need for my entry to Black and White Photography Magazine’s B&W Photographer Of The Year competition (something I don’t anticipate getting anywhere with but I’m giving it a go, and the end result is 4 prints I will like and hang on the wall even if the critics think they suck!

This time last year

Today a year ago I started walking the South Downs Way, and since then in June I walked the North Downs Way. A combined distance with all the to-ing and fro-ing of probably 380 miles. I’m quite a nostalgic person and I own a pair of rose tinted specs for every day of the year but it did get me thinking a little, of how awesome it is to be able to just get out there and walk, enjoy the countryside and take photos. I’m actually going to do a print tonight of Gander Down which is where I walked through a year ago today, pure coincidence but a happy one all the same. (My subject is the South Downs.)

About three-four years ago I had got myself into a rut, one that I progressively made deeper and deeper, it taught me a lot in hindsight but I got in with the wrong people (again) and it almost destroyed me. It’s only now I’m looking back thinking, “What the… why!” I got myself into something I didn’t need to, probably only because I felt lonely and was having a hard time adjusting to the difference of being in University and then going into work, hardly trauma central but enough to unseat you, especially when you get made redundant  and then progressively all your friends move away back to their parents and you’re holding the fort out of stubbornness, blind stupidity and mostly a love of where you now live. This was in 2005/6 (before this recession) so I do feel for people out of work who have strong work ethic, signing on at the DSS is the most humiliating thing I’ve ever done.

And then there’s the stupid things I did in that time too, at the time I felt I should be doing them, and I learnt a lot, saw a lot (and I already had beforehand, life really ain’t all roses and sweet-peas I’m afraid, not for everybody anyway, but you can make your own life pretty OK if you try hard) but even though at the time I felt I should be doing these things, I look back and think what I damn idiot I was. But c’est la vie; it got me to a good situation now of where I know exactly what I’m doing and most of all, I don’t really have much but I’m now happy and even feel that I’ve got to really cram as much in as possible because life is so short!

Next year I have plans to probably do some more chalk-hill walking, Cotswolds Way is likely. I did think of Offa’s Dyke but I also want to go to France for a week and 2 weeks of holiday one for walking, one for France eats half of my annual leave, let alone taking 2 weeks for Offa’s Dyke and 1 week for France, I’ll be left with nothing for the rest of the year virtually.

Nostalgia

Last night I sat down and went through 4 boxes of Kodachrome slides I got back from walking on the North Downs Way. (It equates to the first 4 1/2 days of walking) I swear that looking at projected slides is one of the biggest things people miss out on with digital photography. I don’t like engaging in any trivial spats like digital or film, Mac or PC etc. but the cost of a 1080p projector (which doesn’t have the resolution of projected slides) vs. a half decent slide projector and some well exposed chromes is an experience so many are now not enjoying. The richness of the colour, the detail almost dripping off the slides. Gorgeous stuff.

Anyway, it was lovely just to sit there and “re-walk” that part of the North Downs, really casts the mind back and it was most enjoyable. It’s much more enjoyable to look at a print or a slide projected than looking at something on a computer screen I think, much more detail and saturation (whatever you use, including digital) and this year alone I have had 4 or 5 people loose their PCs due to hard disk failure and you guessed it either no backups or very little, losing all of their photos!

They’re now backing them up thank goodness but it worries me people aren’t looking after their slides, negatives, JPEGs or RAW files as well as they should. Get prints, get photo books done (one of the amazing things we can now do easily due to digital), store those slides properly, just get hard copies and back up any scan files or pictures from your camera. It’s so so important, otherwise we all risk losing a great deal of photographic history of our time on this planet.

Oskar Barnack, the man behind the original Leica camera designed the system to use 35mm movie film because of his asthma. A smaller lighter camera gave him the opportunity to walk and take photos which erstwhile equipment prevented due to its large size — 35mm was and is a miniature format. Yet today super-zooms and cameras including my own EOS 3 whilst undoubtedly robust, it is a big camera and does not make for long journeys on foot in my book. I have done it and for me I found the camera was not getting used because of its weight at the end of the day. You can read more about that in a previous blog post.

Having bought the M2, the plan was not so much to replace the EOS 3 but to have a smaller, lighter camera to use on occassion on walks. The reverse has happened, the M2 is fast becoming the only camera I use. From walks to pub gatherings and taking the odd silly snap down a night club, the M2 has become a a fantastic camera.
This is a short blog post of why I think this and perhaps this might work to your advantage.

Today is a good case in point, I woke up at 3:45am (early I know but sunrise shots do require early shots) and in the event wasn’t overly enamoured with taking my EOS 3, neither a tripiod or indeed taking the Mamiya. I just felt like taking it easy today, and thankfully with a smaller camera like the Leica M2 with a small set of replaceable lenses you have a lightweight, very robust system that can be flexible as well.

On arriving to the starting point Burton Mill Pond it took a while for the light levels to increase before I could start shooting (I was starting with Tri-X at box speed) but this didn’t bother me too much as shortly with the ease of holding the camera pretty steady at 1/15th (which is at least a stop or even two-stops slower than I can hold with an SLR with a 35mm focal length lens) it soon became apparent that not having the tripod wasn’t a hinderance. (I was shooting at f/5.6 with infinity ever so slightly out of focus, to emphasise the morning mist)

The other bonus with a small camera is that you can get into nooks and crannies and places where I find it hard to hold a camera securely or steadily. One of the best cameras for this is possibly the Olympus XA which has a decent fast 35mm (f/2.8) although the rangefinder patch is quite faint on many of them now as they have aged and they’re not quite as durable as the mechanisms in say a Leica or indeed the new rangefinders from Voigtlander or Zeiss (Cosina basically.)

Maybe some day you should give it a try, go out with a smaller camera: a decent digital compact, or a nice simple film compact, or maybe even dip your toes into a rangefinder system if you like the feel of it. It’s perhaps not for everyone, but the simplicity of the M2 is where I find my creativity is growing because I’m not worrying about meter settings, exposure compensation dials, auto-focus methods and so forth. Don’t get me wrong, the EOS 3 is a fantastic camera, but more often than not, I’m finding the M2 to be a much more favourable companion. The EOS 3 has definitely become pretty much my telephoto camera.

I haven’t been using my blog much over the ast few months. I have generally been very busy with life in general. Not least of course with work which has been a great player in my life this year. Not in a negative overtaking way but apart from my photography and walking, it has been my main creative output. So, trying to get things back on an even base before I leave once again for a weeks (for Christmas and New Year) it’s about time I updated this blog on my exploits with OpenSUSE 11.0.

OpenSUSE 11.0 Desktop with Firefox 3 and LyX

I think about 3-4 months ago I decided to give the distribution a go to see how it was compared to Ubuntu (which I was getting somewhat disenchanted by with its somewhat sloppy approach to testing it seemed, and the general default aesthetic looking like arse — don’t get me wrong I know it can be changed but first 8.04 was meant to be featuring a new theme, then 8.10 and I can’t see any real difference… Way to go! Especially with so may talented theme makers throwing their ideas into the pot.)

The only thing I have changed since switching to OpenSUSE 11.0 is not the distribution, but I have dropped KDE 4.1 for Gnome. I think KDE has come a long way but to make the most of it, it does need something a little more juicy than a Radeon 7500 (which is what my ThinkPad T40 has, and that chip was out of date when it was put in this notebook in 2003, and yes — I still have the T40 and no I don’t need a new laptop.)

The main thing that I like about OpenSUSE is the way it really does just work. I have had no problems with media, video, general office applications, networking (wired and wireless), sharing files with Windows/Mac OS X… It all just works. Granted on almost 6 year old hardware, the compatibility should be pretty good now

With Compiz, the equivalent of Vista's Aero, you can get snazzy desktop effects. The difference is they run, and quite well at that, on very modest hardware like an ancient Raden 7500 Mobility GPU!

So where does this leave me in the future? Well in 4 days I understand OpenSuse 11.1 is released and I shall upgrade to that as well. But the bottom line really does seem to be that as an OS, it works so very well. And if you have a fairly well established system (i.e. not bleeding edge) — I cannot see why unless you have to connect to a Windows managed domain and you need specific applications which only exist on Windows — OpenSuse is just about great for everybody. Even complete novices.

Note: Yes I have skinned my OpenSUSE system to look somewhat like Vista with OS X’s Leopard default background. I like it like this, it works well, aesthetically pleasing and it looks quite professional, which quite a lot of themes for Linux[1] don’t.

[1] : I’m well aware that Linux is a bad turn of phrase here with there being KDE, GTK, Metacity etc. etc. themes but for simplicities sake, this makes sense.