Camera Debate
Love the cameras debate. The trick is, I switched out years ago. There are number of places where I can be a total gear-head about equipment, but camera gear isn’t one.
I made decisions, and this stretches back to Austin in the very early double-aughts, I was fishing most near every day and had a couple of European trips planned. I grabbed a camera that cost right at a hundred bucks, and I discovered, at that intersection of time and space, the joy of cheap, handy hardware.
I’ve been through a series of cheap cameras. Unforgiving tile floor, bottom the boat, one left on a train, maybe? Still, the moniker for lo, those many years?
“Boat camera.”
As in a camera I wasn’t afraid to take on a fishing boat, and the quality, there was a line going exponentially upwards with what I could spend on camera, then another line, going downwards, with my average digital image device’s lifespan. For nearly a decade, those two lines intersected right at a hundred dollars.
That “boat camera” has gradually been replaced by increasingly, startling accurate phone cameras. Still, to this day, I have one “boat camera” packed with the fishing gear, but I keep forgetting to unlimber that camera in a boat.
Still, the idea remains, and happening across a camera debate just reminded me.
In my own examples, this is merely about convenience. The original idea for a “boat camera” was to make sure I had something with me, as I departed, when I was walking around, wherever I was. A cheap camera, I would carry daily. An expensive one? I would leave that at home.
One image that forever changed my mind about cheap, mobile phone cameras?
I was using a candy bar, probably a Nokia, digital phone. I think the max resolution was about 640 pixels wide. But in a moment when I had nothing else? That worked.
It was, at that time, I realized the importance and ubiquity of the camera phone, and that’s when everything changed.
The original idea for the BexarCountyLine.com side project? Cheap camera, no tweaking of images. What it’s evolved towards? Just an image dump, but mostly, anymore, all from whatever phone I’m using at the moment. That works.
BexarCountyLine.com
- Aperture: ƒ/1.8
- Camera: iPad Pro (11-inch)
- Focal length: 3mm
- ISO: 64
- Location: 29° 25′ 28.51″ N 98° 29′ 40.7″ W
- Shutter speed: 1/60s
