Photography - a gear rabbit hole

Credit: whatsthebest.co.uk

Anyone who's looked in on this blog over the years will know I like photography. An avid amateur rather than a skilled enthusiast, but I like to think over the years my photography has improved. You can check out a lot of my efforts on my Flickr pages to judge for yourself.

Ultimately of course whilst it's the camera that takes the shot, it's the photographer that sets the camera settings, determines the composition, and where needed and/or necessary does any "post-processing" to tweak the image to their satisfaction.

Like many photographers, I've got through some (probably too much) gear over the years but like many, I also have a tendency to always be looking for the ideal camera setup. The reality is though, that pretty much any camera from the last few years is going to be more than good enough to take great pictures for 99% of people. 

I've recently come very, very close to selling two of my three main cameras and swapping out for another brand - for some sound reasons, but in the end (for the moment at least), I've stuck with what I have because what it serves me well enough.

It's perhaps worth noting here, that (some) photographers can be a snobby lot, both in terms of brand favouritism and/or camera (or rather sensor) size. Basically, the bigger the sensor, the more light comes into the camera and (theoretically at least the better level of detail is achievable).  But there are downsides to bigger sensors. Generally speaking the bigger the sensor, the bigger and heavier the camera and importantly where interchangeable lens cameras are concerned, so are the lenses. This is fine if you're a professional, or studio based "togger" (the slang term for a photographer), but an average amateur/hobbyist like me doesn't want to be carting round a bunch of heavy kit just o take some snaps or holiday photos, especially when travelling abroad.

As an example, last year we went to the island of Skomer off the Pembrokeshire coast to see puffins. There were people there with more cameras and kit than you could shake a stick at, some with lenses as long as my arm, whilst I had a little bridge camera with a tiny sensor. Whilst the big kit guys undoubtedly got some lovely shots, so did I - perfectly good enough for my needs, and given that the puffins were virtually running over my feet, I certainly didn't need a massive zoom lens! 

So my gear has basically been collated to give me flexibility around some specific scenarios that fit my photography needs, as follows.

Fujifilm -S10

The Fujifilm X-S10

My biggest sensor camera is a Fujifilm X-S10. This camera has an APS-C size sensor - see the link above - that gives wonderful images. I've got 3 lenses for it. The standard 18-55mm zoom kit lens (although it's of far better quality than the term "kit lens" suggests. A 50-230mm shortish telephoto zoom, and my most recent purchase a 16-80mm zoom that just gives me a bit more at the wide and zoom ends than the kit lens. 

I use this when I know the images I'll be taking fall comfortably within the zoom ranges, and when I need the highest quality images.

Panasonic LUMIX DMC-FZ2000

Panasonic LUMIX DMC-FZ2000

This Panasonic is a "bridge" camera. Basically this means it's a fixed lens camera - you can't change lenses, but the in-built lens has a zoom range of 24-480mm (at full frame equivalent) on a one inch sensor. The plus is that the reach at the 480mm end of this zoom means it's great for wildlife or distant subjects, but the compromise is the smaller 1" sensor that can struggle in poor light.  However in good light it takes lovely photos, and has the benefit of having that very flexible lens when I don't want to be carting the Fuji and a couple of other lenses around. It's a bit of a chunk though, and not ideally suited to travel (in my opinion).

Sony RX100vi

Sony RX100vi

Last, but by no means least is my pocket rocket. The Sony RX100 Mk 6 is a tiny camera measuring less that 10cm x 6cm but packs a 1" sensor, and it takes outstanding photos for it's size (as do all the Sony RX100 range (currently up to Mk7). It also zooms to 200mm full frame equivalent so has great subject flexibility. I honestly never fail to be astounded by how good the output from this camera is.

It's my go to travel camera and perfect for travel abroad when weight and practicality are needed. 

And finally of course not forgetting my iPhone. Phone cameras on the latest phones are unbelievably good for the most part. They don't stand up to detailed scripting or large prints, but be honest, how many of us print any photos these days? I have an iPhone 13 Pro currently, and the images this phone takes are superb. Sure they're a little over saturated for some, but it's hard to take a bad picture with an iPhone these days, and there's plenty of flexibility for changing settings and on phone editing that arguably makes it my most used camera, because it's ALWAYS with me.

So given the above, why was I thinking about changing? Well, the primary reason is that none of the above kit is weather sealed/resistant. Consequently I'm very cautious about having a camera with me when the weather is inclement. One camera brand in particular, formerly Olympus, now OM-Systems, boasts probably the best weather resistance of all cameras, but in the end I reckon that as I would rarely shoot in the rain even if I had a weather resistant camera, there was no point in swapping, and it was really me just thinking the grass is greener....

My Sony can go in a pocket, and if I'm out with either of the other two units and it starts raining, I'll just have to stick it  in my rucksack or inside a coat. Failing that it's hope for the best.

So that's my kit, and what I use it for. However good they are though, that doesn't stop me looking for my next camera!!!

Tip:

iPhone aside, if you have a camera - any camera, get a spare battery and a spare memory card. Batteries run out at the most inopportune times, and a memory card can fail leaving you unable to save a photo. 

Twitter: @Statto1927 

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/people/simon_hiscocks/ 

Instagram: simon_hiscocks

Flat Holm excursion

Right of centre: Flat Holm and Steep Holm from Penarth
You can guess which is which!

Flat Holm and Steep Holm are two islands approximately 1/3 and 2/3 distance respectively between Lavernock Point in the Vale of Glamorgan, South East Wales and Weston Super Mare in Somerset, England. Flat Holm is part of Wales, whilst Steep Holm belongs to the English. Living in the area, I've often looked at these islands, but this year we decided to go and visit Flat Holm. Both are actually accessible to visitors, although bookings need to be done through proper outlets. We booked a trip with Bay Island Voyages leaving from Cardiff Bay. 

Our ride with Cardiff Bay and Penarth Head in the background

Our fist booking a couple of months ago was cancelled due to inclement weather (which might be a good thing as you'll read later), but we rebooked last week, and went out on Wednesday 26th. The trip allows for about 2-3 hours on the island, which is plenty as it's only about 1 square mile. Note that the Steep Holm trip leaves you there for 12 hours, presumably due to tide limitations.

Approaching the sea locks on the barrage on our outward journey

We met our crew at Cardiff Bay, and got suited up with lifejackets and had our safety briefing, before heading out into the bay towards the large sea locks that we would pass through into the Bristol Channel. Wet weather gear is recommended for the trip - spray is possible, let alone risk of rain, although to be fair we got neither and stayed dry. It's also as much to keep warm on the ride over. The ride was smooth(ish) in our RIB with Craig at the helm. I'd imagine on a non flat sea it could be quite fun!

Arriving at Flat Holm jetty

Once dropped off at the jetty, we were met by a couple of the wardens who gave us some quick instructions about what to do (and not to do) and look out for. After this we walked with them to one of the buildings to pay our £5 per person landing fee (cash only). 

There's a permanent residence of wardens/rangers on the island, although they rotate every month or so. They look after the upkeep of the island and undertake research as well as looking after visitors. The island is also visited by groups such as scout groups, and there is a camping field, some bunkhouse accommodation although this is all relatively primitive - luxury glamping or camping this is not!

With one of the wardens (Josh) we then did a shortish tour of the island, with Josh giving us some great information on the history of the place and showing us the sights. After the tour, we had some time to wander around on our own, before heading back to the jetty for our pick up.

There are several aspects to the islands history, much of which you will find in the links above, or by doing a bit of your own research and Googling, so I won't repeat any detail here, but broadly:

• The island has been inhabited by various people since the Dark Ages, or possibly earlier.
• There's the lighthouse and foghorn station. The light is still used to warn shipping of the islands hazards, but the foghorn has been silent since the late 80's/early 90's bar a reprieve for the millennium celebrations.
• The Victorians had a barracks here with 9 gun emplacements to ward off any attacks from the French, although this never came.
• It was here that the first radio message over water, sent by Marconi from Lavernock Point was successfully received. The message was "Are you ready?"
• There was a cholera isolation hospital on the island
• It's home to the most southerly pub in Wales, the "Gull and Leek" (although it's actually a very small room in the Victorian Barracks that does serve bottles of beer and snacks).
• It's a haven for wildlife - especially gulls
• There's a very small museum and gift shop in the barracks, but again this is cash only.

A word on the gulls. Flat Holm is a nesting colony for gulls - predominantly black backed and black headed gulls. There were thousands of them. The wardens warned us that they could be quite aggressive - indeed they ARE aggressive during peak nesting season (May/June - so this would have been the time of our original booking - good miss!), dive bombing and pooping on anyone who comes close to their nests - which frankly is pretty unavoidable! Their best advice was to wear a hat, and not look up!

Flat Holm light

The old cholera hospital

The old farmhouse, now warden and visitor accommodation

The disused foghorn

Resident bunny

There were gulls. Lots of gulls. No really, lots

One of the old guns

Gun and light

Gun emplacement

The guns were house in cylindrical pits to hide them from any marauding French. They were then raised up to fire. There were 9 emplacements in all, but never more than enough gunners to man 7 of them at once.

Awaiting passage through the sea locks on our return

All in all we had a very enjoyable couple of hours on the island. I'm so glad we went and explored somewhere that's so close, and yet so far away. Highly recommended.

Twitter: @Statto1927 

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/people/simon_hiscocks/ 

Instagram: simon_hiscocks

Blagdon Air Pump 250 review

My pond last year

I've had a small garden pond for a few years. We've only a small garden and only have room for a tiny pond, so as you can see int he photo above it's a pre formed plastic pond about 1.5m x 1m - I can't remember the capacity, but I think it's around 150l.

Initially I had about 6 small goldfish. A couple died, a heron had on and I was left with 3. A couple of years ago I noticed some tiny fish swimming around, and with one of the bigger ones dying I now have a total of 9 - a couple of the originals and 7 small ones that are now around an inc or so long. Because the pond is so small, it tends to get green very quickly in summer even though it's got a health population of oxygenating plants, but that's clearly not enough. I had a small fountain for a while but it kept getting clogged or falling over.

This year with the heat over May/June the pond's got particularly murky and is now like green soup. I've switched a load of water out a couple of times and stuck some small barley straw bales in (which is supposed to help), but thinking about a fountain again to get the water moving to oxygenate, whilst Googling I came across pump aerators. Basically a small pump that sits outside the pond, with a small pipe leading to an airstone that sits in the bottom of the pond. Air is pumped through and bubbles up in the pond providing water movement and oxygen. 

Those of you living in Cardiff may have seen similar stuff on a MUCH larger scale in Cardiff Bay where there are aerators throughout the bay and up the rivers Ely and Taff.

There are a few different types on ones suitable for ponds on the market and I eventually settled on the Blagdon Air Pump 250 (this is an Amazon link, although I purchased mine for the local garden centre.

Blagdon air pump 250

It's a simple unit, coming with the pump, 5 minutes of piping and an airstone. This has one outlet, but you can get bigger pumps with 2 or 4 outlets. It's weatherproof so can sit outside (it DOESN'T go in the pond!!!!)

A couple of things to note.

1. Like many outdoor electrical items - especially ones that are to be used in/around water, this doesn't come with a plug. You have to add that yourself. 
2. It should always be used with an RCD circuit breaker
3. The power cable is only 1.5m long

This presented a slight problem for me. The nearest power socket is in my conservatory, but that's still about 8 metres from the pond. The cable is not long enough to site the pump outside the conservatory.

So I've left the pump in the conservatory, and bought some additional piping as the included 5m length wouldn't reach the pond, and added the additional piping out through the conservatory window, on a run to the pond. I was worried that the extra length might reduce the pumps efficiency (but it doesn't).

It all works fabulously. The pump is quiet enough to be relatively unobtrusive. It pumps air with plenty of oomph to aerate the pond visible with small bubbles rising from the airstone.

I can't say anything yet about longevity, or whether it'll make the fish any happier and the pond less green as I only installed it today, but I'll come back and update once I know the score on those things. I'm pretty happy and the only question I have is "why didn't I think of doing this sooner?". I'm sure my fish think the same.

Twitter: @Statto1927 

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/people/simon_hiscocks/ 

Instagram: simon_hiscocks

24" iMac - its upgrade time

24" iMac in blue
(but I got the silver one)

I've been an Apple diehard for well over a decade - almost 15 years in fact. My first foray was a MacBook Pro laptop for my 50th birthday in *cough* 2009. It's still going strong and has been upgraded a few times although sadly no longer capable of running Apple's latest Mac operating system. Since then I've added numerous iPhones, iPads and in 2013 a 21" iMac desktop. That's served me well and again is still going strong. However, it also won't run the latest OS (in fact it's about 3 versions behind now), and I've also recently had cause to bemoan that it won't run a couple of bits of the latest versions of software I own/use.

Having summed and ached for almost a year I suppose, I've finally bitten the bullet and bought the newest version of the iMac. The smart (and even sleeker)  24" version running Apple's own silicon, the M1 chip.

First things first - the elephant in the room. Apple kit is ridiculously expensive. I could have bought three of four windows desktops for what I paid for his specific version of the iMac. But, and I appreciate this is a wholly subjective viewpoint, the Apple ecosystem is fabulous. It works for me and their kit is beautiful to look at, and I find very functional and easy to use. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, one of Apple's founders and now sadly deceased, "It just works".

I went for a model that had extra ports (the base model has only two Thunderbolt/USB ports - this ones 2 Thunderbolt and Two USB 4 ports. I also went for a version with an upgraded memory (16GB instead of the base 8GB), and an upgraded SSD (storage) up to 1TB from 256GB at the base end.

That all meant a substantial hike in price, but the one (potentially negative) thing about the iMacs is that they're not upgradeable after purchase. If you need  extra memory/storage, you need to spec it up front. This should future proof my purchase, and I wanted the extra memory and storage primarily for my photos/processing. Yes I could get an external storage unit (in fact I have three external drives attached to my iMac), but I like plenty of onboard storage too.

The other key decision was colour. Once upon a time, all Macs came in beige. Then silver. Now there are 7 colours to choose from for the iMac (less for the base models). Many people get/got quite excited by this, and whilst I quite liked the blue model, 1) I'm not that fussed by colour on my computers, 2) I'm an Apple traditionalist so silver works fine for me, and 3) they only had the blue or silver in the configuration I wanted on the day. So silver it was.

It's a one box solution, and in keeping with Apple's beautiful design, even the box and packaging is cool.

The iMac in it's protective box

Once out of the box, you get the computer until, a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and a USB4 to lightning cable to charge the two accessories and that's it.

Out of the box and ready to go

Connecting everything up was a breeze and boom - we're away.

Back in the day, a new computer meant copying over all your files and reinstalling all the software. Today things are much easier, and a "migration assistant" basically lets you copy everything from the old Mac to the new one. You can do this wirelessly, via Ethernet cable or Thunderbolt/USB if you have the right cables. I opted for an ethernet cable. The whole process took around an hour, and as if by magic, my new iMac was a replica of my old iMac.

The migration assistant doing its thing

It's worth checking your software for the latest updates. I found a few programs that needed updating, and a couple that needed some reconnecting (my backup programs for example knew that although I'd migrated everything, it was on a new computer and I needed to tell it that it was OK for the new box to "claim" the settings for use on this iMac.

Ready to rock and roll

Generally, it was a painless exercise, completed pretty quickly until I got a message saying there was an update for the operating system. That took another hour or so, but installed without problem.

I'm very happy. The new screen is gorgeous (it's 10 years of technology advancements newer) and the unit runs fast, quiet and is a joy to look at.

NowI need to work out what to do with my old iMac. It's still perfectly functional.

Twitter: @Statto1927 

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/people/simon_hiscocks/ 

Instagram: simon_hiscocks