Author: zermatt

Saturday evening Brussels

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I bought a new camera today. I had been thinking about it for a while. I have 16.000 photographs on Flickr, and some of them were actually good. But I stopped taking serious photographs about 10 years ago because carrying all of the camera gear was heavy. I shot sports photographs, and I routinely carried more than 20kg of camera equipment around with me. It got heavy and I started to have back problems.

I’ve been looking at a lot of beautiful travel photographs lately and thinking, I used to be able to do that. So I bought a camera to allow me to do that. There is already a dust spot on the lens which is irritating. Automated sensor cleaning is not working to remove it so I post processed it out. That is frustrating to say the least. But I like the photograph.

The camera is a Canon R8 which is a full frame. In digital terms, this is new for me. I shot film for a good few years so this isn’t absolutely new for me but it’s been a while. I have a kit lens, 24-105mm. I like it a lot so far. I don’t want to acquire loads of lenses, and this has a pretty decent macro function. That’s unexpected. So ultimately I will probably look for a 70-200 or 70-300mm zoom at some point. They aren’t really urgent though because I am not photographing sports for which it would be urgent. I need to learn to navigate the controls because there are a few differences – especially because I do shoot in manual a lot. But there are some photo style things I want to look at which might be interesting. Somewhat annoyingly, there is a dust bunny already on the sensor and the in camera cleaning is not removing it. I will need an little air pump thingie to see if I can blow it out. It didn’t occur to me to buy one today.

I haven’t looked at all of the photos from today yet because it took may ages to get the transfer to work via wireless. I’m not altogether happy with how that is working – I cannot get it to work via a cable for example and the wireless connection disconnects me from the internet. As the upload from the camera isn’t really fast enough, I’d like functional internet while that is happening.

Lost sketchbooks

Back in February, I lost my handbag and it took with it my then every day carry sketchbook. I was pretty devastated as there were sketches from my most recent holiday in it. I had to lie to the loss of it, plus the every day sketchkit

But I got really irritated this week because I mislaid an A4 large sketchbook. I run god knows how many sketchbooks at the same time but two are fairly regular, one A4 which I take with me sometimes, and the little A6 which is always in my handbag. I searched the house several times and eventually found it under a pile of new books for which I do not currently have shelf space. I am not far from the end of it – I knew this much because even if I could not remember what was it (and when I found it, nice things were in it), the replacement was lined up which meant I was probably a dozen pages out from the end.

I’ve been tidying notebooks today. During the pandemic, I sketched daily, in or other of the sketchbooks. But in Brussels, the art supply and stationery shops were open so having nothing else to do, I bought notebooks, sketchbooks and art materials. I bought books and a few jigsaws as well. But I am now struggling to organise them and while I am doing better on using my sketchbooks and paints lately, it occurred to me I really need to figure out what to do with all of these notebooks (gift them? I’m not ready to give them up yet). The main answer of course is to use them.

Which still leaves with with the open question on how store them, organise them and all that. I never quite got to grips with that for the vast quantities of photographs I took. We’ll see.