Life Observed

Back in the days when pubs were full of cigarette smoke (remember that?) you could get pictures with "atmosphere" like this from around 1990. These days they seem to think that a stage performance needs "atmosphere" adding from hidden smoke machines. I hate to think what is in the atmosphere.

Don't try it at home, but I'm going to neck eight cups of tea today.  Eight. Seriously, don't try this yourselves. It's taken me years of training building up to this level. You have to pace yourself and start early in the morning.

There was a family do at the weekend. Champagne: (Nice pub, the Wych Elm) Cheesecake: (No - I don't usually take pictures of my dinner) An experiment: Taking photos with a phone rather than a camera. Conclusion? Hmm. The images are nice and sharp. The camera is exactly the same size as the phone. Is it a substitute for a camera? No, not really.

Well here we are a year later, in another place with another camera. I sold the Fuji and jumped to eight megapixels after reading the reviews of the Olympus C8080.  What a great camera: It was made from aluminium alloy, not plastic, with a really classy wide zoom lens. The tiny rear screen could tilt, it had buttons all over it. This was certainly a better picture taking tool than that Fuji. In general the image quality was now up there with my old slides. That's the rear bar in a smart Cotswold pub, it's ceiling covered in a collection of tankards. I used this Olympus for a couple of years and was well pleased with it. I have to admit that indoor shots like that one above were sometimes more noisy than I would like. The camera could shoot raw image files but it took so long to process them it was a joke.  Surely I was not going to change gear again ? Is there a pattern developing?