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One piece of gear that I always bring with me is a camera. For quite some time I have always brought one 35mm or another, and also my JVC video camera. I like good cameras and so it's always a balance between risk of camera damage and good pictures. So far I have been lucky - no cameras have been injured in the making of the trip reports! No matter what the type, I recommend bringing a camera with you on the trail, even if it is a throw-away model. I have been involved in photography since I was a kid. I started with clones of Kodak Instamatics. My Dad has an Argus C-3 that always fascinated me.
He made super pictures with it and I knew that one day I would get myself a 35mm. The time came when I had a reason: I got myself assigned as the yearbook photographer for my high school class. My friend in the class ahead of me had an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic that his brother bought for him while overseas.
He brainwashed me into thinking it was the only 35mm camera worth owning. Short of hardcore scientific work, or heavy-duty expedition shooting, it remains a standard by which others are compared. Until recently, I have concentrated my entire 35mm system around the Spotmatic family of cameras. I have never been disappointed with the results they produce and the Super-Multi-Coated Takumar lenses made by Asahi Optical Company in Japan are outstanding. I use other cameras with larger film sizes, but for my trips with the Jeep, the small cameras remain the tool of choice. Be that as it may, most of my trip reports were fairly major productions. I would have to supply myself with film prior to the trip. Then I would be loading the camera in the woods, usually once or twice, depending on the day. Then when we returned from the trip, I would bring the film to be processed. When it came back, I would then have to scan all the images, three at a time, crop, adjust and save them to disk. Then do the web page stuff. It could take two days worth of work just to get the photos done. Meanwhile I saw people whipping out their digital cameras and posting their pictures a few minutes after they got home. In many cases, the image quality produced by the cameras was inferior, but just the ability to get the pictures up was very attractive to me. I started using our JVC video camera to shoot limited digital images.
It has the ability to shoot and store up to 20 - 320 x 240 digital images. In some cases, these images were sufficient to document out trips. But like other low-end digital cameras, the picture quality was not up to my standards. I used it, but I wanted something better. Eventually, I realized that my other photographic work was being slowed by using film, with the same process and scan delay, not to mention the associated work to get digital images ready for use on the computer. I had to get a higher quality digital solution that would solve this problem. My friend Hugh showed up one day with a nice little SONY that stores the images on a CD. Another time, Hector came with his camera, the same as Hugh's. I checked the features and the image quality and decided that it would work for what I was doing. I am still lusting after the Pentax ist-D digital SLR, that will work with my Pentax lenses, but I shall have to wait for the budget to accommodate it.
In the meantime, the SONY will work just fine! The difference in production time is staggering. No sooner than I have a free moment after our trip, I pop the CD in my computer and save the images to my hard drive. That's it. I am done with what used to take two days of errands and a night of scanning! This is great. The camera has some limitations - it requires batteries, is fairly delicate, and has a lens that is limited in it's ability to provide wide angle and telephoto features. But overall, it works well for a high-end snap shooter. And it makes tolerable movies with sound!
Now, I can shoot to my heart's content. I bring one or two blank CD's (counting the CD in the camera, that gives me room for about 2700 pictures sized 1600 x 1200. Each CD costs about 50 cents. I carry an extra battery. On long trips, I bring the charger and the power inverter. I try to keep the camera clean and dry and so far have not dropped it. Hugh says dropping it will cause problems with reading CD's from the camera on the computer. I'll take his word for it! Features and Specifications
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