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Usually stuff I’ve written personally, stuff I think is pretty good.

Point and Shoot (feat. Olympus mju-II)

A roll of film: $10.

A new camera: $70.

Realising that the above title could have meant that this post could been about DayZ, or about a new film camera: priceless.

As much as I enjoy shooting film, using cameras from the 60s (and especially at the sub-$100 price range) mean you do without some of the modern niceties such as autofocus and autoexposure. In the beginning, that was okay — even without a working in-camera light meter, it was okay. Guessing exposures was pretty educational at the very least, and photos that turned out “good” were all the more satisfying because I know I had more input that I would have had if I had used a modern DSLR.

I’m not saying that you get sick of setting the exposure, then manually focusing the shot, but after a few rolls it starts to get a bit old. I wanted something that was easy to shoot film with, something with good enough optical quality, and something that was much more compact than the behemoth of my Yashica Lynx.

Cue the Olympus mju II. Also known as the Stylus Epic in the US, it’s a small film camera that features autofocus and autoexposure — even the text printed on the back describes it as an ultra-compact 35mm camera. It fits into basically any pocket, has a super-fast startup time, and best of all, shoots film. You’ve probably seen one of these before, and for good reason: it was an extremely popular camera, back in the days when film was much more popular than it is now.

My only complaint about the mju II is that the viewfinder is… tiny, to put it nicely. It’s perhaps half the size of your thumbnail — which is minuscule compared to the viewfinder on your typical DSLR, and if you don’t put your eye up to it at exactly the right point you’ll see nothing. Once you get over that, it’s a nice film camera which seems to want to fire the flash more often than is truly necessary. My version also has one or two issues with loading film, which means loading a new roll takes a minute or so longer than it should, but it’s really a non-issue because everything else is perfect.

The Olympus mju II has a fixed 35mm lens that has a maximum aperture of f/2, and I’ve heard quite a few people rave about how good it is for its size, and especially compared to some of the higher-priced point-and-shoot film cameras. Maybe if I had a few thousand spare I might have gotten a Konica Hexar AF instead, but for now, the mju II was the better choice. It came in a zoom version as well, but apparently the prime version has better optics…

And it’s such a blast to shoot with.

Instead of lugging around the ol’ ball and chain around your neck, you’re simply reaching into your pocket, sliding back the cover, and taking the shot. You think less about the technicalities of taking the shot, and actually take the shot.

It’s easy. Effortless. It means that good pictures as easy to capture, because all you’re doing is depressing a shutter button — and sometimes, that’s exactly what you need to do. Sometimes it’s about the shot itself, rather than setting up the aperture, shutter speed, and then focusing the lens.

But why not do the same with digital, you might ask. After all, there are plenty of good point-and-shoots available for the digital format, some vastly more capable than this little Olympus. That, my friends, is a question for another time.

DayZ Review (feat. Diablo III)

The quintessential DayZ experience: three guys in a field, about to loot through a town, with a single zombie in between them and beans.

Another exam period finished, another game thoroughly played.

For a long time, I’ve always wanted a realistic zombie apocalypse game that was more military simulation than arcade first-person shooter, and in terms of realism, DayZ — the mod for ARMA 2: Combined Operations that’s perhaps the most realistic zombie apocalypse game I’ve ever seen — delivers in spades.

It would be unfair to describe Arma 2 as anything other than a military simulation, as there’s so many aspects to the game itself — radios, ranging, realistic bullet physics, real weather, and so on. DayZ builds upon that, with a few custom weapons and, of course, zombies.

The way it begins is this: you’re dropped into a post-apocalyptic world, filled with zombies. You spawn on the beach, and what you do from that point on is entirely up to you, with the overall goal being to survive as long as you possibly can. Everything is out to get you (zombies, the environment, other players), and you start with basically nothing; I remember the days when you spawned with basic gear — a small pistol, a few bandages, ammo, and enough food and water to get you started. But a few weeks ago, the developer (Rocket) changed the spawning gear to be just a flashlight, a single bandage, and painkillers. Lest you starve or die of dehydration, your first task as a new Survivor  should be to find a few rations — perhaps a water bottle that can be refilled from fresh water sources, or a can of lovely mountain dew.

What you do from that point on is up to you.

Do you lone-wolf it and try and find some kind of weapon to defend yourself from the zombies? Do you continually roam around the cities in your never-ending search for supplies? Or do you gear up and see what the wide open world of Chernarus has to offer?

It’s this combination of military simulation, zombie apocalypse, and open sandbox that means DayZ is so compelling to play. There’s so many things to do — if you’re geared up well enough, do you start setting up camp (provided you can find a tent)? Or do you start looking for a better mode of transportation? And if you run into another player, what then? Shoot on sight, or let them live? There’s so many questions that are asked of you during your time playing DayZ, and you’ll have to make all the choices. Will you explore the big bad world beyond the two or three main coastal towns?

Some choices are easier to answer than others: if you’re temperature falls below a certain amount, you better find yourself a heatpack, or stay indoors until you warm up. If you catch a cold, you better hope you can find antibiotics in a hospital, lest you attract zombies with your coughing and spluttering, along with the gradual decrease in your blood level to half what it normally is. If you’re thirsty, you should drink, and so on, and so forth.

Some of your actions even have consequences: if you’re hungry, you should eat. Consuming an easily-found can of beans only replinishes around 200 blood, but if you happen to come across an animal that can be killed, gutted, and the raw meat cooked, you’ll find that replenishes much more blood (800), but requires many more tools. You’ll need to find an animal, for one, then you’ll need a hunting knife to gut it, a hatchet to cut wood for the fire you need to cook the raw meat, matches to make a fireplace, at which point you can finally cook the meat you found on the cow’s dead body. Enjoying your steak raw, sadly, is not an option when you need the blood.

There’s so many ways to accomplish the same thing in DayZ. You can, for example, light a fire to warm up, instead of going indoors or finding a heatpack. There are many ways to replenish your blood, too: you can eat (beans or cooked meat), or you can get a blood transfusion, with the latter option requiring another player and a blood pack — an item only found in one of the four hospitals in Chernarus.

You'll do a bit of running in DayZ. Did I say a bit? I meant a lot.

It wouldn’t be a military sim without weapons, and DayZ is the perfect blend, weapons-wise, between realistic and military. Common weapons you can find include crossbows, double-barrelled shotguns, winchesters, Lee Enfield rifles, and a whole assortment of sidearms, from the humble Makarov (the previous starting sidearm), to the trusty M1911, revolver, M9, and many more. It isn’t until you start looking for higher-tier weapons that the real fun begins: you can find scoped hunting rifles like the CZ500, and then you get into the true military weapons: M16 and M4 variants, AK and variants, light machine guns like the M249, silenced sub-machine guns, and even massively overpowered sniper rifles like the M24, DMR, and 50-cal M107. All guns make a distinctive sound when fired, so you can tell whether a player is firing an M1911, or whether you should be running for your life any second now because he’s got the gun with the biggest range in the game.

In true DayZ fashion, the zombies are affected by pretty much everything. If you run, you’ll attract zombies. If you crouch-run, you’ll attract zombies. If you crawl, you might attract zombies. If you fire a gun that makes a sound, you can expect all the zombies within a 50-meter radius to hear it, and if you’re firing a weapon in town, you better hope that there aren’t any curious players who come to investigate. That’s kind of the beauty of DayZ: there’s always another way. If you want to kill a zombie that’s between you and an objective, you can — either use a silenced gun, or even melee using the hatchet or crowbar. Flares attract zombies. Smoke grenades attract zombies.

And the zombies in DayZ? The zombies in DayZ hurt. If you’ve got aggro, they come at you at a frantic pace, hurt when they hit you, and can cause you to start bleeding out, or even break your bones. Thankfully, you can outrun zombies if you’re standing up and running — you can lose the zombies if you break line-of-sight and they don’t see (or hear) you again, but you can usually expect your running to attract even more zombies, especially if you’re running through a town. The line-of-sight thing is pretty interesting, and makes zombies fairly easy to evade if you’re running through a town — harder to lose if you’re out in an open field, but still possible. The line-of-sight is an interesting game mechanic anyway, and means even that newer players have a chance to survive (or they’ll learn stealth, which will help them out in the long run).

Health in DayZ matters. You have a blood meter, and if you’ve been in battle and taken a hit, sometimes you’ll start shaking from the pain, making accurate gunfire impossible. Thankfully, you can take painkillers to numb the pain. If a zombie breaks your bones, or if someone opens a door on you and you break a bone (it’s still an alpha, remember), you can fix yourself up with morphine. If you start bleeding out, you can bandage yourself up.

Yes, there’s quite a lot to DayZ — and we haven’t even discussed looting, vehicles, other players, playing in a group, or even death. But the reason DayZ works so damned well — even in its current alpha state — is that it’s just fun to play.

Diablo III isn’t quite the opposite in that it’s still fun to play, but it’s just not as compelling when compared to DayZ or even its predecessor, Diablo II. Diablo II was much, much darker than its successor, and Diablo III just feels as though it’s been given an overhaul for the worse. I know they’re essentially the same game, but it doesn’t feel as foreboding. It tries to be, what with the grotesque models and overall evil themes, but it just falls short of the level set by Diablo 2, and I’m not entirely sure why.

Don’t get me wrong, for the most part the graphical upgrades are more than welcomed (gaming at 800×600 isn’t my idea of fun these days), but instead of using those fancy new animations and graphics to make a better, gritter game, all Blizzard have done is put a few new colours in here and there, made gameplay simpler along the way, instead of making it darker, like a true sequel to Diablo II should be. I enjoyed Diablo II because it was exactly the kind of game I wanted to play — a dark and gritty game, filled with unknown terrors and semi-RPG elements.

Now, Diablo III feels like it just doesn’t have that special spark, and all because they’ve added a few new colours into the palette. The core gameplay hasn’t been changed all that much — Diablo III is still a dungeon crawler at heart — but it has been made to seem more attractive to newer players. The typeface is different, more inviting, which contributes a lot to the overall look and feel of the game. It’s a beautiful game, but there’s no compelling reason to play it besides the continuation of the storyline, and I’m honestly not sure if I would have played it at all if I wasn’t such a huge fan of the second Diablo game. For those that actually want a “nicer” dungeon-crawling game with a more upbeat tempo, there’s always Torchlight. Diablo was supposed to be the go-to game for dark and gritty, and the third one in the series just doesn’t deliver.

Which is a real shame.

DayZ is different in every way. Because it’s based on a military sim, it’s so much more different than your typical zombie apocalypse shooter. There’s not much actual gameplay, to be sure, but that’s half the fun: when you’re given no strict instructions and no real goal apart from just survival, you make do with what you have. At first, you’ll loot cities for all the beans you can get your hands on. You find a weapon to defend youself with. You kill any zombies that cross your path.  You make your own decisions when it comes to killing other players, or letting them live. You team up with other players with the goal of survival, and maybe you’ll abandon them to save yourself from the horde of zombies, maybe you won’t.

But that’s just where the fun begins.

Sometimes you're killing zombies, or repairing cars — other times, you're attaching scrap metal to houses.

Spotify and Me

Spotify launched in Australia around a month ago, during which I was able to give it a red hot go. I wrote on MacTalk about my experience with the all-singing, all-dancing streaming music service:

On the face of it, Spotify is brilliant. Who doesn’t want a music collection the size of the iTunes Music Store for free? All the big names are on-board: Universal Music Group, EMI, Sony, Warner, and so on. Spotify means that anytime you want to listen to a track — be it something that you’ve just Shazam’d or something you heard on the radio a few days ago, you can open up Spotify, search for your track or artist of choice, and listen to their music, completely free of charge.

[…]

When I first started out, I wasn’t so sure about Spotify, either as an iTunes replacement or as a standalone music ecosystem. I had my doubts about how Spotify could work for me, especially with such a heavy emphasis on the social and music discovery (and it’s not just because I have what some would call an extremely varied music taste, either). The fact that Spotify prioritises the social aspects of music over some of the intelligence of iTunes should give you some idea as to whether Spotify will work for you. Maybe the world doesn’t need to know you love listening Carly Rae Jepsen as much as you do, (which is exactly why there’s a Private Session feature). You can share tracks, artists, albums, or playlists to pretty much anywhere you can think of. There are still things that irk me a bit about the service, such as the fact the range of metadata is paltry, no, basically non-existent, in comparison to iTunes. You don’t get play counts in Spotify, Last Played info, number of skips, or any of that kind of information. It’s basically just track name, artist, time, and album. That’s it.
But you know what? Not having all of that metadata is strangely liberating, too. It means I don’t have to worry about meticulously keeping my library organised, or worry about album art, because Spotify does all of that for me. I get that Spotify isn’t for everyone — if you’re into very specific music genres or particularly obscure stuff (you hipster, you), maybe Spotify isn’t exactly what you’re looking for in a streaming music service. But hey, that’s what the 30-day trial is for, right?

At the end of the day, I’m not sure whether I’ll continue with Spotify or not after my trial is up. It’s a great service, and there’s a lot to love. Being able to look up and play almost every artist I can think of is extremely, extremely cool; it innately satisfies the desire for instant gratification everyone seems to have these days, and perhaps for that reason alone, means that Spotify will be hugely successful. On the other hand, I miss my metadata and my smart playlists terribly. Having none of that info in Spotify is a pretty big blow to how I’ve been listening to music in the past.

Earlier this week, I cancelled my Spotify subscription. As it turns out, I did miss that kind of metadata more than I might have originally let on. The thing is, I rely on play counts to tell me how much I “like” certain music. Last played information, combined with play counts, tells me how long it’s been since I’ve listened to heavily-played tracks in my library, like Call Me Maybe. I’m convinced that Smart Playlists are the best thing since sliced bread, and losing them in Spotify was too much of a compromise, seemingly for the advantage of music availability and discoverability.

Which is kind of a shame, because there’s lots to love about Spotify Premium. Having the biggest music library accessible wherever you have a data connection is nothing short of amazing, and it comes in ridiculously handy forms: a few friends wanted to listen to a song, and instead of looking it up on YouTube, I simply opened up Spotify, put in the artist name, and there it was — because if nothing else, isn’t technology supposed to make this kind of stuff more accessible to people? Isn’t technology like Spotify meant to lead to greater enjoyment of the things you love the most, i.e. music?

I liked how Spotify because it scrobbled to Last.fm on mobile. I liked how having Spotify on my phone meant I didn’t have to carry around all the music I wanted to listen to. I liked (in part) how Spotify was all about the social — sharing music to others, listening and subscribing to playlists others had made, and even all the discovery features to help you to discover new music. In the end though, paying $12 a month for those privileges didn’t seem worth it to me, especially as I started listening to my own music within Spotify towards the end of my subscription. I mean, doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of having the largest music library, literally at your fingertips?

Thankfully, there’s good news. The difference between Spotify and Rdio is that Spotify has a free tier, too: for exactly nothing, you can use Spotify as a preview of whether you’ll like a new album by an artist, or if you’re just looking to play a song that you don’t own and don’t want to go track down. You don’t get access to the mobile version of Spotify on the free version nor any of the ofline features, but that’s not a big deal when you’re listening to local files you own, anyway. Plus, I don’t mind syncing music to my device even though it takes up precious megabytes. All this means that Spotify on the desktop still manages to satisfy that “instant gratification” drive I have when it comes to music — I can still listen to any song I want to, just with a short ad interspersed between tracks.

In fact, just the other day I opened Spotify to listen to a Pink song I had heard before but didn’t own — after playing that a few times in Spotify, I acquired a copy and now it sits on some 68 plays in my iTunes library.

If you haven’t given Spotify a go yet, you should. It’s a good service with many neat features — it’s just that for the way I personally listen to music (i.e. going for the overplay with one, two, or a whole album at a time and swapping between artists and albums I love), Spotify and Me just weren’t meant to be.

And I think I’m okay with that.

Overexposed

Third post in one day? I must be procastinating assignments (like that doesn’t happen enough already).

I got a day off work the other week, and I decided to go back to the Salamanca Markets. I really love the Markets for street, because there’s more than enough subjects to photgraph. Tourists pointing their DSLRs at locals, locals trying to sell their wares to tourists, buskers, people just enjoying the atmosphere, and more. Last time I went was back in February, and I took my DSLR that time. This time my Yashica would be tagging along for a bit of film action.

I managed to go trough four rolls in the space of two hours, for a total of 103 exposures. Once you get into the zone, it’s all just shoot, advance, shoot, advance. It’s a good feeling.

The only bad part was, most of the photos turned out quite overexposed. I think it might have been the tricky light conditions fooling my light meter, or just the light meter not giving me an accurate read-out, but most of the photos have an opaque white cast to them, what I believe is overexposure in the film world. Digital overexposure means that the whole image is uniformly brighter, but film overexposure is different, as far as I can tell.

In any case, here are a few of the better ones. They’ve been knocked down by up to a stop — there were others, but these are the ones that turned out kind-of okay and didn’t have too much of an opaque white cast.

The good news is, I’ll have a few more days off the in future, so I’ll definitely go back.

What happens if the social web as we know it isn’t actually all that social?

Stephen Marche, The Atlantic:

The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus. The depth of one’s social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another. For the most part, Facebook doesn’t destroy friendships—but it doesn’t create them, either.

On the face of it, it seems crazy: social networking that isn’t social. But like it or not, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and your social network of choice are pretty much everywhere. But what does that mean for you? I mean, aren’t you the one that decides what to post, where? Aren’t you the one that decides how many friends you have, or how privy other people are to your innermost secrets, or at least the ones you choose to share with your fellow socialites? While at least some of that may be true, it doesn’t mean that social networking is all that social. Let me explain.

Almost half of the Australian population uses Facebook. And I can tell you from first-hand experience that Facebook is great! Fantastic, even. When Facebook first launched, I remember the stories of how it meant people could keep in touch with people they thought they had all but lost contact with. There was quite a bit of press about people getting in touch with their teachers from high school, or with long-lost relatives, cousins, friends who had moved to other countries. For most people, that was a great thing: it meant that people didn’t have to track down relatives by calling sixteen different individuals just for an email address, or having to go and do the legwork to get in touch with someone from high school. Anyone could just add their friend on Facebook, and that was that. Easy, right?

Thanks to this thing called the Internet, Facebook suddenly made the world a smaller place. Now it doesn’t matter what country your friends are in, or whether a few streets away, or a few thousand kilometers, because as long as they’re online, you can talk to them in real-time. It doesn’t matter how separated by geographical distance you are, because the internet is everywhere. It doesn’t matter if you can’t see your friends in person on a weekly or monthly basis, because the internet is always there.

To reiterate my original question: what happens if social media isn’t all it’s chalked up to be? What happens, instead of connecting people (hi Nokia!), the social web just serves as a reminder for how lonely we all are?

Granted, that’s a rather pessimistic way of looking at things. Perhaps, then, the above statement could be rephrased as such: as well as connecting people, what happens if the social web also serves as a reminder for how lonely we all are? I have friends that only post the most enthusiastic stuff. They’re seemingly always happy. They’re seemingly always content, and never upset, sad, or anything else.

One one hand, that’s great, you know? If they’re happy, I’m happy that they’re happy. But on the other, you have to wonder: if someone is posting about how much they love their significant other, or how great their life is, and I’m here reading their happiest-ever-status, doesn’t that mean my own life is a miserable mess by comparison?

Once again, Stephen Marche:

When I scroll through page after page of my friends’ descriptions of how accidentally eloquent their kids are, and how their husbands are endearingly bumbling, and how they’re all about to eat a home-cooked meal prepared with fresh local organic produce bought at the farmers’ market and then go for a jog and maybe check in at the office because they’re so busy getting ready to hop on a plane for a week of luxury dogsledding in Lapland, I do grow slightly more miserable. A lot of other people doing the same thing feel a little bit worse, too.

It’s this passive consumption that means the social web might not be all it’s chalked up to be, and it’s this passive consumption that means when you read about how great someone else’s life is, your own life will seem less so by comparison.

Real life isn’t like this. You don’t know what the person on the street is feeling. You don’t know what they’re thinking, or how their day is going. If you ask them, you’ll probably find out, but who wants to go around asking total strangers how they’re going, how they’re feeling?

Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes I ask myself if any of this social networking stuff is “worth it”. I wonder if keeping up-to-date with Facebook, or Twitter, is “worth it”. What do I gain? The question, once again, could perhaps be better rephrased as: do all these social networks make me feel more connected with people I care about, or less so?

I’d like to think that social media has made our lives better. In ways, it has: it means we can talk to our friends in a different time zone. Social media, the social web, whatever you want to call it, has meant that we can connect with Mac enthusiasts from all over the world. It means that we can connect with famous photographers, people we look up to, and yes, even our long-lost relatives or friends that we just lost touch with.

But there’s always the other side of social media, the side that everyone seems to ignore just because the advantages seem to outweigh the negatives. The side that says you shouldn’t use the social web to supplement your social activities, but instead use it to complement them. The side that says this “passive consumption” is bad for you.

If you’re wondering by now, you should probably read the entire article by Stephen Marche, but I’ll quote him again anyway because it serves as a nice summary. (The article, if you’re wondering, is about whether Facebook makes us lonely, but most of the topics I’ve covered here are one and the same.)

LONELINESS IS CERTAINLY not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves. Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our actions is a weak excuse. We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around. Every time I shop at my local grocery store, I am faced with a choice. I can buy my groceries from a human being or from a machine. I always, without exception, choose the machine. It’s faster and more efficient, I tell myself, but the truth is that I prefer not having to wait with the other customers who are lined up alongside the conveyor belt: the hipster mom who disapproves of my high-carbon-footprint pineapple; the lady who tenses to the point of tears while she waits to see if the gods of the credit-card machine will accept or decline; the old man whose clumsy feebleness requires a patience that I don’t possess. Much better to bypass the whole circus and just ring up the groceries myself.

There’s some stuff in there that’s for another time, but for now, you’ll excuse me to post about how good — no, great! Fantastic, even! — my life is on all the social networks.

Film, continued

Red Awning

One of the crazy things I love about film is that your photos can change depending on what film you’re using, how it’s developed, and if you’re getting scans done, how good the scanner is.

It’s like each kind of film has its own character. Each kind of film is unique, different to the next, and I’m not even talking about the difference between B&W, slides/transparencies, or colour negatives, I’m talking about differences in grain type and amount, colour reproduction, dynamic range, and so on.

The differences between different brands and even different labels within the same manufacturer is crazy. Buy Kodak Portra, and you’ll get different/better skin tones than, say, Kodak Gold. Buy Kodak Ektar and, you’ll get much nicer grain than Kodak Ultramax (ISO differences aside). And so on.

It’s one of the things that appeals to me about film: digital is very predictable in terms of what you can expect straight out of the camera, whereas with film the kind of film you’re shooting can have a much greater impact on your photos than what kind of lens you’re using, for example. The differing characteristics from one film to the next give it that special edge over digital. It just adds a bit of variety, you know?

One of the realities of photography is that as you increase the sensitivity, you increase the amount of artefacts that appear in your image. With digital, as you ramp up the ISO you get more noise. With film, as you get a higher-rated film you get more grain. But here’s the rub: film grain resolves detail much better than digital noise does. Not only that, but film grain is much more evenly spread out across the image. Compare that to digital, where noise is essentially just a whole lot of random pixels, and can differ in appearance depending on where it appears in the image (i.e. it’s more pronounced in shadows than it is on subjects).

Don’t get me wrong, film is “worse” for grain at the same sensitivities when compared to digital. My DSLR can practically see in the dark when I’m shooting at ISO 12,800, but things are, not surprisingly, pretty noisy at those kinds of ISOs. At the same sensitivities, digital beats film hands down — but I much prefer the look of film grain to digital noise.

I’ve been asked if I develop my own stuff, and the answer is: no. Not because I don’t want to, but because that’s a whole other can of worms. For now, I get my C-41 (colour negatives) processed and either scanned or printed locally (i.e. Hobart), and I haven’t shot any E-6 (slides/transparencies) but I know that no one in Hobart commercially develops it anymore, and same goes for B&W.

I mean, developing your own film does have its advantages; you’re the only one that gets to see your “work”, you’re totally self-sufficient, and apparently it’s extremely cheap to DIY, but — and here’s the kicker — it’s a lot of extra work. Developing your own negatives requires messing around with chemicals, temperatures, not to mention the fact you need to arrange some kind of total-darkness environment. We haven’t even touched on the problem of needing to digitise your own negatives/slides, requiring a half-decent scanner if you want any kind of quality scans. Consumer flatbeds just don’t cut it.

Make no mistake, developing your own negatives is a whole different ball game. It gives you total control over your photography, but it’s a lot of extra work on top of just taking the shot.

Maybe I’ll start thinking about developing my own if I start taking this any more seriously than just what I’m doing at the moment, but for now, the local lab does acceptable scans, even if they’re not as high a quality that I would like (only 3 megapixels!).

I have a new camera on the way, which is a nice little Olympus point and shoot. I’ve been wanting a film camera as a daily carry for a while now, and maybe this little Olympus will be a good compromise for the time being. At least until I work up the courage to fork out for a Bessa, anyway.