English Music's photostream

I am a lover of traditional instrumental folk music and enjoy recording it in various ways, sound, photos, and particularly video. It is good to capture events for posterity, which might otherwise be lost forever.

Taking photos of celebrities, musicians and others.

I try to follow an ethical principle of trying to ensure that people look good, and would hope not to publish any unflattering pictures. In the case of musicians, I normally only publish photos of them during a performance, on stage etc, and not when they are resting and unguarded. Performers on stage know they are in public view.

I am an occasional amateur musician, having played keyboard, piano accordion and fiddle, but these days I prefer to leave it to others (mostly).

Work? I don't think people should be defined by their paid occupation and I am always striving to achieve a work-life balance.

A photographic CV

In the early 60's most people I knew had only very simple roll film cameras designed to look fashionable but whose only concession to sophistication was to perhaps have built-in flash (using flashbulbs). I recognised the need for better, and got a 35mm camera with variable shutter speeds, aperture, and focus, all manual, no metering, no rangefinder. (Halina 35x). I was interested in relatively low light photography (e.g. indoors) and read some books on photography. I never liked using flash even then, and still don't.

You would have to calculate from tables the correct exposure and estimate the distance for the focussing. The next step was to get a light meter - a luxury. I also had a tripod.

I was taking mostly black and white pictures at that time and later had a go at developing the film and printing it.

About 1970 I got an SLR with metering and rangefinder and a few years later a succession of better ones including Pentax ME Super and MX. Colour photos now. I was mostly taking slides at first but went over to prints later, up until the digital era.

I actually got a camcorder before I got a digital still camera. Sony Handycam, Hi8, but at that time the big problem with video was dealing with the material you have recorded. What to do with it all?

My first digital camera was a Fuji 2800. 6x zoom and electronic EVF viewfinder. A nifty little camera. I liked it.

Since then I got a Sony W5 compact camera, chosen partly because it had some measure of manual focus capability. This was the first time my 'main' camera was a compact one, and now the tables seem to have turned. In the 60's I was the only one with a big black camera round my neck and others were using 110's they kept in their pocket. Now I had a compact camera everyone else was going over to big digital SLR's. But it is better to have a modest camera with you than a wonderful SLR at home in the drawer, too heavy or valuable to take on an arduous holiday.

Now I use a Fuji 'bridge' camera which I prefer to SLRs for convenience. Mine is Finepix S6500fd. It has 10x zoom and can take video, but what I really like about it is the rotary zoom control on the lens. I still use my Sony W5 when portability is an advantage.

There is a certain amount of picture quality which I consider to be a 'must', but I'm not really concerned about going further. Large numbers of megapixels are good to have sometimes, but eat up computer disk space, and often wasted because the biggest problem with image quality can be due to camera shake or subject movement when light is low, or various focussing shortcomings often due to depth of field. The lower end camera manufacturers are using 'megapixels' as if it was a direct numerical measure of the quality of the camera.

I now have a digital DV camcorder but have such a backlog of recordings on tape which need editing that I hardly dare use it.

My use of Flickr

Although a keen stills photographer I use Flickr almost entirely for video. I have used all the above electronic cameras and camcorders except the Fuji 2800 for the various videos in my Photostream. Sometimes quality has been compromised by using a digital camera on holiday, with the need to conserve memory space somewhat, and by low light. I still think the results are worth having. Much of the video here is a record of an event which has otherwise not been recorded by anyone else. Priceless!

I take an interest in the forums here and the issues I am interested in are video quality, video thumbnails, and the photostream page layout.