End of the holidays

The end of the holidays is fast approaching. The schools will be back next week. Tomorrow, Australia Day public holiday, and the weekend will be big days for the crowds here in Terrigal.

Those of us lucky enough to live in this beautiful place are looking forward to the town being a little quieter from next week.

It's been a very hot January. Hot and even more humid than usual. It has been stormy but rain has only interrupted the beachgoers on a few days and then usually only for a few hours late aftenoon.

Today, Thursday 25th, it is again very hot and oppressively humid and there is a layer of cloud so it does not look its usual Kodachrome best. The top photo was taken this morning at Terrigal Beach. 

The summer of 23/24 has been the year of the cobana on the beaches.  People are being more sun conscious although all the pretty young things running around still seem very tanned so sadly I cannot see the skin cancer clinics running short of patients anytime soon
 

The second photo is one of my favourites and was taken on the 29th January 7 years ago at nearby Avoca Beach and shows teenagers, enjoying the last day of the school holiday jumping from the headland into the surf on another very hot day.

The top photo was taken with the Leica Q2. The bottom photo was taken with the Leica X Vario

The Haven, Terrigal

 Sunrise at The Haven, Terrigal photographed yesterday morning whilst on my early morning walk with my iPhone13 Pro.

I still do not have much enthusiasm for using my phone for taking photos which I would have preferred to have used a camera for but I have to conceed that it makes a very good job of it.

I used the High Efficiency and Apple ProRaw settings on the phone. I find that my Mac struggles to process these files in Lightroom with the computer frequently freezing. I'm not sure if it is a Lightroom or Mac capacity issue.

Camera thoughts

 No new year's resolutions for me. I never keep them. However I have decided to take some decisions about the cameras I own. The collection currently is much smaller than it was a few years ago but I have one camera system- the Panasonic Lumix S5 and lenses- which I have hardly used since I purchased it in June 2022.

Buying it was a mistake. I did not need another camera and although it is an very capable camera and system and capable of producing superb results it has one major drawback. It is too heavy. Well probably not too heavy for most potential users but too heavy for me. My days of hauling around a bag full of heavy gear are behind me and I should have recognised that obvious fact before buying it. 

I made quite an investment in the Lumix outfit. Even heavily discounted the superb, but, oh so heavy, 70-200mm f2.8 lens alone cost A$3000. It was a mistake and a costly one.

Which brings me back to the core of my collection-the Leicas. Firstly there is my heriage Leica, the 1937 Leica 3A. My first Leica. Purchased way back in 1967. This was fully renovated last year. I have run a colur film through it with good results. Two photos from it are below. Now I have to apply myself to finishing the 35mm black and white film I have in it. 

 

Using the film is not as as easy as it sounds. Using the 3A is very slow work. I don't know how the early Leica users took the photos they did. They certainly were committed. Just imagine what they could have done if they had used today's cameras.

Second in the stable is my Leica X1. My long term favourite. I now have two of them and I've dusted them down, charged their batteries and used one of them in the last few days. Here's one of the photos I took with it - a DNG file post processed in LR.

When I first moved to Terrigal back in 2008 I took my X1 with me on my early morning walk every day used used it to take a wide variety of subjects including friendly locals. Now the whole scene has changed. The number of people walking early morning has increased considerably. And many are not so photo friendly and of course there are smartphones. So I now use my iPhone13 Pro as my early morning camera as well as using it to pay for my coffee and to catch up on the Guardian Australian edition whilst drinking the coffee.  

It would be nice to be able to say that I can see the X1 having a new lease of life in my hands but that is not realistic. It is victim of the iPhone. So here's an early morning walk iPhone13 photo.

However the X1's more sophisticated sibling, the X Vario, is a different case. I still use mine regularly, particularly as a "cat camera" as the tiltable, accessory shoe fitting, EVF allows me to get down to cat level without lying on the ground.

 Although it is nearly 10 years old and by today's standards the specification is modest I still cherish my X Vario as the image quality is superb. 

When launched the X Vario was maligned but it was very much a victim of very poor marketing and a really nasty social medi "pile on".

For a neat reprise of the X Vario story see this on the Macfilos blog  X VARIO

 I see from Lightroom that I have taken over 3000 photos with my X Vario so making a very small representative selection is not easy but here they are

That brings me to the final two cameras in my Leica collection.-the Sofort(!) and the Q2 but they will have to wait fot the next post.

2023-a year's photos.

 So much happened for me in 2023. Settling into a new home, with a delightful new partner. Totally renovating the new house with all the upheaval and hundreds of decisions that involved. Really the start of a second life. And of course some travel. Just a few days in Tasmania fell into 2023 and then a glorious trip to the Kimberley late in the year. Much less travel than many prior years but given what else was happening this was not surprising

There was little time for photography however in the few quiet hours I managed to browse through my Lightroom photo library and found so many photos I taken in prior years and had totally forgotten or not even looked at previously. This exercise has prompted me to select just 100 of my "favourite"photos to put in a photobook which hopefully will see the light of day in the next few months.

Below is a selection from the rather slim pickings of my 2023 photos. Inevitably my beautiful cat, Marvel, was my favourite subject for the year. The Leica Q2 was the most used of my cameras but the Leica X-Vario was favoured for Marvel along with the Lumix S5 and the newly acquired iPhone13Pro produced some photos for the selection.