Solitude

Solitude, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

God I’ve been lazy about posting…sorry.

To be honest there hadn’t been much to photograph recently. I’ve been playing with textures and toning as you can see on my flickr page, a few shots of the beach came out nicely but apart from that there wasn’t much.

Then last week I went camping. I try and camp at least once a year and always want to get away more often. This time, the wife and I went north, about 20 miles past Lairg in Sutherland to Strath Naver.

Sutherland is a barren, mountainous place and was the area most affected by the infamous Highland clearances. It is stunning and if you ever have the opportunity to visit, just go…it’s one of the last true wildernesses in the UK and one of the least ‘touristy’ parts of Scotland.

So there was plenty of photographic fodder, we hiked about 8 miles away from the road and fished a chain of hill lochs. The weather was sunshine & showers, incredibly cold in the early mornings and most interestingly of all it’s the breeding season for deer. Every night at sunset the stags would start bellowing and this would typically go on most of the night…ear-plugs are essential!

Despite their size and the fearsome noises, they stayed away from us. They only get vicious when cornered and are surprisingly timid. Due to the lack of a long lens, I couldn’t get any really good shots of them...but just being there was special. I’m really pleased with some of the landscape shots I took, if you’re really interested you can see the lot here or a few selected highlights here.

Back to the beach this week, inspired by the genius of Martin Parr. If you don’t know who Martin Parr is and you like photography go learn…

I’ve spent the weeks since my nieces wedding studying people shots, trying to understand what a good people shot looks like. With this in mind, I took the shot on the left…I didn’t get it quite right…but I’m having a lot of fun trying!

I don’t often have views on gear…but this is a bit of landmark. Nikon have finally managed to squeeze a video mode into their latest DSLR, the D90.

It’s incredible to watch the passionate reaction to this on the dpreview forums…these forums can be really aggressive but very informative and I’m amazed by the brand loyalty and complete lack of objectivity highlighted by some of the people who post.

The D90 announcement was welcomed on dpreviews Nikon forum and derided on their Canon forum. Despite the fact we all know that the Canon R&D people won’t be sleeping until they work out how to put video onto the next EOS. Canon also announced their 50d this week…to a fairly lukewarm reaction…..bigger processor, some additional bells & whistles, but no video mode or other ground breaking deal. Round 1 to Nikon then. BUT, the successor to Canons excellent 5d is supposedly around the corner so this year’s battles are far from over.

As a neutral it’s great to watch, also I have enough trouble trying to get still images right, there’s no way I could shoot decent video!

But the idea of using macro, zoom and wide angle lenses to shoot video must have appeal to a lot of people. I would imagine that for the average amateur looking to move from Point & Shoot to DSLR, the presence or lack of video could be a deal breaker. I was that person a year ago and it sure would have impressed me, newbies tend to look for feature rich cameras rather than image quality, or the lens range or anything else.

I think it’s great - Nikon continue to innovate and challenge Canon’s market share. As do Olympus and Pentax and Sony on a smaller scale. Whilst this competition exists, we’ll keep getting new concepts and ideas on our new cameras. I wonder what the next big thing will be?