flowtik's photostream  

An amateur photographer, who appreciates chiefly candid and street photography, though I guess I'm probably better at very 'technical' photography.

I started off in the days of black and white, in about 1999. I'm glad I learned my photography in this way, but I don't miss it. How much better to sit in a shady bit of park editing pictures on a laptop, than to be locked in a cramped, stuffy darkroom full of chemical smells.

After losing some films in the darkroom, I finally took the plunge and bought a digital camera - now I have to deal with dodgy flash-cards instead! But for image quality and ease of use, digital cameras are unspeakably wonderful. I find myself enjoying colour photography for the first time.

The other huge advantage of digital photography seems, paradoxically, to be its de-nerdification. When I went to photography competitions with the university photography club, we would watch slide after slide of still-life and landscape photography. Nary a picture of people to be seen. Compare and contrast with Flickr. It always used to be a struggle to learn techniques, such as motion blur or how to adjust the aperture, simply because the gap between taking the picture and seeing the result was so great. It's great to look at so many pictures taken by people who are more interested in the pictures than the tools.

I did sports photography for the University student newspaper for several years - although I was more interested in wildlife photography, given the local wildebeest shortage rugby players had to do instead. And I regularly got to take pot shots at the air ambulance. I also had a summer job in a medical photography department.

Now my main interests are high-speed photography - fun but difficult to be original, and taking pictures of things for Ebay.