Ten years ago....

Ten years ago to the day I was on a riverboat sailing down the Mekong in Vietnam having just crossed from Cambodia. It was a great trip and I was reminded of it recently when I saw a set of photos taken in Cambodia. They were black and white photos. I am not a black and white enthusiast nowadays. Don't get me wrong-it has its place but to my mind that place is now very small.
I’m no stranger to black and white as for the first 40 years of my photographic life I shot, processed and printed, predominantly black and white and so I have taken tens of thousands of black and white photos. Whilst I used to enjoy working in the darkroom economics dictated my long embrace of black and white. Colour film was expensive and slow. As soon as digital offered a means of shooting acceptable colour I switched to it and I have done very little black and white in the past 15 years.
So the photos I took ten years ago in Cambodia were, of course, colour and to my mind IndoChina is such a colourful region that to not use colour to photograph it is to miss recording an essential part of the culture of the region.
Some of the photos from my trip are below. They were all taken with my then camera of choice - a little Canon G7. The G7 and its replacement the G9-there was no G8 -were superb cameras in their day. They have metal bodies, a very good zoom lens, straightforward menus and controls and an integrated optical viewfinder. The G7 only took JPEG files and that shortcoming was corrected in the G9 which also shot RAW. By today's standards the low light performance of the small sensor in the G7 and G9 was poor but for most of the time this was not an issue. The early G series cameras from G7 to G12 are still exceptional cameras. As I type this my G9 is currently on active service in Morocco in the hands of my son-in-law whilst my daughter has taken along her personal G9.
The good news is that you can find a low mileage G9 on eBay for as little as A$100 today. What a bargain.

The Canon G7