Doctor Casino's photostream  

the boy's got brains, he just don't use 'em is all

I take a lot of pictures, mostly on film. Mix of good-times-with-friends, "ooh that's pretty," and architecture, which often includes elements of the previous. I also use this stream to document/archive my own non-photographic projects for school, etc.

CURRENT CAMERAS:

In general I keep at least one camera with me at all times. When I don't, I almost always have cause to regret it....

My main shooting SLR, starting in late December 08, is a Canon EOS 650.

For evenings or when I don't feel like lugging around a big ol' bag, I've used various generations of the Olympus Stylus; there's some variety in this camera's features and decision-making circuitry but as a general rule the Stylus line features very high quality lenses for a point-and-shoot camera. I'm now on my 5th or 6th Stylus (this one was $3 at Goodwill) and it's still great.

Digitally speaking, I've also had a Canon Powershot A570 for about a year now (writing in March 09). It's okay, not great, and a major advantage of digital - knowing what the pictures look like when you take them - is undermined by the wide gap between the brightness of the camera's screen and the actual brightness of the image histograms. Anyway, I use it mainly when workflow demands it.

PAST CAMERAS

Photos older than the Summer of 2002 were more or less all taken with disposable cameras or their equivalents (including an Advantix camera as well as a couple of webcams). July '02 marks the debut of my first Stylus and around August of '03 the Stylii begin to be supplemented by SLRs.

The first of these was an Olympus OM-10, a good learning camera, although its focusing mechanism was a little hard to get used to (or ever really master).

My parents gave me the Minolta (see below) and eventually I passed the OM-10 along to my friend Hillary in August of 2008, to accompany her in an ongoing adventure in South Asia. From the prints I've seen, she's made good use of it.

From roughly fall 2004 to summer 2007, my main shooting SLR was a Minolta SRT-101, dating from the 60s or 70s. Minolta didn't change their lens mount design for a long time (through several upgrades of the camera body hardware), so there's an astonishing variety of cheap lenses available; also it's a workhorse and in general never let me down.

Note that this camera requires a battery (the PX625 mercuric oxide battery) no longer made, in fact forbidden by law. This can be worked around by using a modern V386 battery and the MR-9 battery adapter. Since the battery is only used to power the metering apparatus, battery life is long and the camera will still mechanically "work" even when the battery runs down.

Following some unsolved light-leak problems (causing the big bright blobs that you'll see in some of the older photos), I picked up a used SRT 200. This was not as fully-featured as the 101, but was compatible with the lenses I was lugging around and so it became my primary camera from June 2007 to December 2009, when my father passed along the EOS-650.