Slow couple of months for my Photography

The last couple of months have been excruciatingly slow for my photography.   I put it down to 3 things; the weather, Christmas and, renovations!

Let's start with the weather.  If you have been living under a rock the past few months, you may not know that Australia has had the hottest spring & summer on record.  That plus the biggest bushfires seen in years that burned nearly 114,000 square kilometres (larger than many sovereign countries).  A nasty side effect of these bushfires was the vast amounts of thick, choking smoke that just hung in the air for days and days on end.  Mind you, that smoke made for some great Sunrises and Sunsets that I have seen on various photography pages but, it played havoc with my seasonal asthma and so I hibernated inside in the air conditioning through all those weeks.  Also, when the temperatures soared into the mid 40s and remained there for days on end, it was not good to go out wandering around for prolonged lengths of time!

Christmas was also something else that bit into my time for any photography.  I worked over most of Christmas and New Year and on my days off spent my time renovating!  Just before Christmas we had to say goodbye to our beautiful Barney; constant companion and all round intelligent, good dog. He had Pancreatic Cancer and was pretty crook.  The prognosis was very grim.  That broke our hearts.

Prior to all this happening, we had decided in late November, to get floating floorboards in the living areas of our house.  What a great idea!  We figured we would lift the carpet and tiles ourselves.  Carpet was a breeze.  Lifting tiles is an entirely different kettle of fish!  It was the most back breaking, dusty job I have ever done!  Tile and Mortar dust from one end of the house to the other; fine dust that found its way through every nook and cranny into drawers and cupboards alike.  The cleanup took ages and we are still finding dust in places that you wouldn't believe!

 

The floorboards are down now and all that crap we went through was totally worth it!

So, as you can see, I have not had any extra time to get out and about with cameras!

I am, however, prepared for my next jaunt!  I have a AGFA APX 100 B&W loaded into my Minolta X-700 with a 50mm f1.8 lens. It's seems a while since I shot a roll of black and white.  I have taken a few on that roll already and looking forward to putting it into the lab.  

I also have a Fuji Velvia 50 loaded into the film back of my Bronica ETRSI.  This is a daylight slide film with which I hope to capture some Sunsets and Sunrises.  I'll have to do a little planning before taking that out; slide film does not have the exposure latitude of a negative film.  I may have to take a variable ND filter along with me to get a nice even exposure.

I also purchased a new DSLR just a couple of weeks ago.  I have had my Canon 600D for some years now and had some concern over how many shutter activations it has had.  I didn't want that camera to up and die on me leaving me in the lurch.  I had considered a full frame camera but, couldn't justify the price of one of those considering that my photography is only a hobby.  I then looked at the Canon 80D which was receiving some pretty good reviews on line.  Whilst I was familiarising myself  with that camera, I read that the Canon 800D was actually a new model and had a newer sensor system than the 80D.  That was interesting!   Now I would have been happy with either of those cameras.  One thing that I was a little disconcerted about was the release date of these cameras; the 80D in 2016 and the 800D in 2017.  I didn't particularly want to end up with a camera that had sat on a warehouse shelf for a number of years.  I had considered going rogue and getting a totally different brand of camera but, I have a number of lenses now that I can use on Canon Cameras and it was more practical to buy Canon for that reason.  

I finally settled on a Canon 90D.  A new release from Canon and therefore less warehouse shelf time. Plus it has the LCD screen on the top right hand side of the camera for easy reference.  It also has the Digic 9 32.5 Mp sensor.  More than one third higher resolution than the 80D or 800D and (almost) twice the size of my 600D 18Mp sensor.

I have played around with it at home and it has some great features.  Can't wait to get it out there for a decent trial!

Lo and Behold, after our blazing hot, fiery Spring and Summer that seemed to burn all the way down the east coast of Australia, we are now getting storms and rain.  The rain is great but; we are getting so much of it now that some of those areas that were burning are now flooded, and more rain coming!  The countryside has greened up beautifully around Newcastle, giving me even more reason to get out and about on a Photo Safari!