Taking Shots
Post date: Aug 13, 2012 7:44:42 PM
Quite a few people have asked us about the camera we use for our photos. Many of them seem to think that we have an expensive and sophisticated system. We don't. We have an old Canon Powershot 780 that cost us about $225 three or four years ago. We have carried it for hundreds of miles on the trail and literally hundreds of thousands of miles on airplanes. In that time period, we've probably taken 5,000 photos with it. And we are pretty darn happy with it.
We bought it for two major reasons:
1. It has a viewfinder. P doesn't like using an LCD screen in bright sunlight--particularly because he wears polarized sunglasses on the trail--and that means you just can't see the screen in the daytime.
2. It's small, smaller than his Blackberry, and weighs only about five ounces. That makes it easy to take wherever we are going. We would post a photo...but we'll have to find a mirror first...grin
Instead, we'll just post a couple of photos from our last trip. The one upper left is a shot of moonlight on the water at Waugh Lake.
And upper right is M enjoying the view from one of our campsites. It reminds us a bit of a Maxfield Parish painting.
Over the years, he's learned how to adjust exposures, use the zoom to frame the photo, and adapt to the viewfinder, which always shows a bit less of the scene than you'll see on the final photo.
So the next time you a photo you like on this website, don't be misled. It wasn't taken by someone who knows a lot about photography. And it wasn't taken with a complicated SLR camera with lots of lenses or attachments.
It was taken by someone who got up into the Sierra so far that anyone could take a picture and have it look good.