Tom's Photo Page

At Christmas 1998, I acquired a digital camera (some reprobate stole it in March 2000, but thanks to Eagle Star I was able to replace it in mid-July). Since then, and particularly after acquiring a nice large flash-card and an unreasonable collection of rechargable batteries, I have taken several thousand photos with it. When I had a machine with a permanent fast Net connection in my room at Oxford I made them all available on-line; nowadays, I have only a few megabytes of Web space, so I have to select.

This has its benefits: by putting up only the best 5% of my work, I can make myself out to be a far better photographer, and I can carefully crop and post-process the images rather than submitting two and a half thousand of them in bulk to the untender mercies of a perl script.

Picture pages

• NEW pictures from my trip to Minneapolis, Easter 2001
• The wedding of Joanna Mary Walton and Emmet Anthony O'Brien
• An assortment of cats (and other animals); cats are almost as photogenic as babies, and can be photographed without having to pester parents for permission.
• A beautiful still lake in the hills near Vancouver

About digital cameras

Digital cameras are great for two reasons: feedback and capacity. You can get feedback on the picture composition almost as easily as with an SLR (the SLR is, admittedly, superior if you want to do interesting things with depth of field and position of focus; the digicam doesn't have aperture control, and digicam previews are always of the whole frame which makes it hard to judge focus), and you get instant feedback of exposure which the SLR does not offer at all.

For capacity, it is a qualitative advantage to be able to take ten photos of a difficult subject and delete nine obvious duds, or to be able to take lots of photos over a week's holiday without changing film or lugging around a laptop with you.

And, knowing that failed pictures are free, there's a much stronger temptation to experiment; my family accuse me of profligacy with film, but even I would not have tried taking flash photos of an indoor fountain using a 35mm camera, and I'd have missed the wonderful droplet-shapes to the right. Some time I'll go back and shoot off a film with my SLR there; the CCD in a digital camera is rather slow for this sort of action photo

Useful things to add to an off-the-shelf digicam

• They use batteries at an enormous rate; I've taken to carrying a set of four charged AA batteries with me whenever I'm using the digicam, and packing a recharger. The NiMH batteries packaged with the DC240 seem to run a lot longer than off-the-shelf NiMH ones. Do not even consider using non-rechargable batteries. Swapping out batteries is much more difficult with cameras using proprietary battery solutions; I'd strongly recommend checking that your camera runs on AAs.
• Even with the huge drop in memory prices since March 2001, cameras tend to be packaged with an 8M Compact Flash card. It's currently possible to get 64M of compact flash for less than a hundred pounds, and I strongly recommend getting at least this much; having to carry around multiple cards is irritating. 128M might be excessive, but I haven't had the chance to test this yet :)
• There are two or three standard ways of getting the pictures from the camera to your computer. I've found the absolute best is to get a CompactFlash PCMCIA Adaptor and plug it into a laptop, but this is of course impractical if there aren't laptops around.