Title • between destinations

It seems as though the fates are currently frowning on chromasia as now, in addition to a broken camera, I also have a dead router and am having to connect to the internet via a modem – which is a bit of a pain, to say the least. I've ordered another one, but it will take a few days to turn up :-/

Anyway, enough complaining ...

I had an email today, prior to taking this shot, from Rachel James, and she kindly agreed that I could use it to preface this image:

I've followed your website since it's incarnation and you are a good photographer. To see you say: "I strongly suspect that I'm not going to be able to come up with anything too good with it ..." troubles me.

I should think that no matter the tool - lo-fi analog or high-end digital SLR - that a photographer should be able to produce "good" photographs.

Maybe you'll have to work a little harder, tap deeper into your creativity, step out of your comfort zone. Maybe instead of ten fantastic, mind-blowing, super-saturated shots, you'll have only two.

Our cameras are tools, nothing more. And I know you know that.

Warm Regards,
:) Rachel

And I was going to reply that I agreed that lo-fi analog cameras were just as valuable an artistic tool as hi-fi digital ones, but that lo-fi digital cameras were another matter entirely; i.e. that the inherent noise and other digital artefacts and distortions rendered them less than ideal tools for constructing worthwhile images. And then I got home and looked at this shot, and I'm forced to change my mind. I'm not sure quite how good the original 2400x1800 image would print, but as far as web-based images go I don't think this is in any way noticeably inferior to the stuff I've been producing with my G5. That said, this image (and yesterday's) were both post-processed with Noise Ninja, and it's made a hell of a difference to the image quality. In the past I've complained about the noisiness of the G5's sensor, but it's nowhere near as bad as the one in the FujiFilm. Even images exposed under perfect lighting are incredibly noisy, so being able to 'fix' an image in this way makes a huge difference.

In this sense then I do think that lo-fi digital cameras are problematic, but clearly these problems can be overcome.