My Quiet Life

Actually, this post has me thinking: what typically kills a DSLR? That is, beyond dropping it from 4 feet (which will kill a DSLR. trust me on this one. RIP D30), what are the things that will typically break in a DSLR first that will make it prohibitively expensive to repair versus the cost of a new replacement? It’s sortof like a car. As long as the engine and a few other critical components don’t die, you can keep repairing it, barring a money pit situation. So, what is the “engine” of a DSLR?

The shutter?

I think I’m okay here. I have shot around 15,000 frames, and before that I’d guess the previous owner did a third of that, but I don’t know. This thread indicates an average lifetime of 50k frames with a typical consumer EOS body shutter. So not a problem. And even if it did break, apparently it’s not a difficult repair to send in and have done — a few hundred bucks. (Though, with the plummetting cost of DSLRs, a “few hundred” quickly gets into viable replacement territory, depending on how many “few” we’re talking.)

The sensor

I am curious about this, and I have my suspicions that this will actually begin to be the thing that causes me to replace it. I don’t think that it will ever just completely die, but I already have a scary number of dead pixels (as I learned when I started doing lightning photography with long-exposure noise reduction turned off). There’s also a weird pock-mark I can visibly see on the sensor, which yields a little circle sometimes that I have to clone out. I have a feeling the sensor might eventually get beatup enough that it’s unusable?

CF card slot

I don’t know what the possibility of this dying is, but I’ve read about people having problems. And I don’t know a lot about embedded electronics, but I’m guessing the CF reader is incorporated into the main board itself, and this is likely prohibitively expensive to replace/repair. I really have no idea though.

What else? What will kill a DSLR?

Yes, Another Picture Of the Damn Skyline. What can I say, I like it up there. I saw my homeless buddy Jackie and he didn’t ask me for money this time so hopefully we’re past the awkward “money? no. money now? no. money this time? NO.” phase and can just chat from now on. It was really nice up there tonight, though there was a very nasty slick of oil on the river that you can see in this picture.

I think my camera is dying. Although this is promising. I am going to try that this weekend. At this point I have shot around 15,000 frames with my Canon 20D, and I bought it used, at that, so who knows how many exposures are on that shutter, but I’ve heard most consumer EOS bodies are good for 50k exposures. Maybe it’ll last me a while after all. I dread the day that it dies, though.

So, a few discussions this weekend got my gears turning: one, a conversation with a friend about a picture of a pretty girl, and a weird/creepy experience newscoma had with some pictures on flickr.

The former revolved around a great picture of a very pretty girl taken by my friend Karen (who is a great photographer, check out her stuff). I just mentioned how I think that picture is funny because it represents to me how much the photographer impacts the portrait being taken as much as the subject. (For more on this subject, read this very interesting post over on the online photographer.) That is, I have a feeling that this picture, taken by Karen, who is, herself, a very pretty, friendly and approachable woman (who may or may not know the subject, I don’t know) would have turned out much differently had it been taken by me, a .. dude she doesn’t know. Probably less relaxed, more awkward, and more guarded. Possibly a “why the fuck are you taking my picture” expression. This is what I like to call the “creep with cam” (CwC) effect.

I mean, those of you that know me know that I’m not a creep. Those of you that REALLY know me know that I sorta am. But, those of you that really REALLY know me, know that, deep down, I’m not. But the creep-with-cam stereotype exists for a reason. They’re out there — oh man are they ever out there. You know the type. The sex-deprived nerd that long ago, at the first viewing of a porno mag, realized the potential of a camera as an avenue into the world of Real Actual Naked Women. They are not always such a harmful bunch, usually just the lovable but preverted socially dysfunctional nerd type. But they can get weird.

Anyways, I don’t know that I had a larger point here, except that the extreme CwCs sorta ruin it for the rest of us. Being a Standard Issue White Male, I am constantly racked with self-consciousness when I am out taking pictures of anything that can be misconstrued as Creepy. There’s a public fountain near here that is basically on any given summer night a bonanza of families with kids playing in the water.. But, you know, I have my doubts about taking random candids of random girls — this goes double for someone’s kids. You could ask permission, but that sorta ruins the whole “candid” thing. I even felt a little weird taking my camera to roller derby… I wasn’t, you know, thinking . o O ( GIRLS!! ), I was thinking . o O ( SUBJECTS!! ).. (okay, I was thinking girls, but not insofar as photography goes).

And then there are people who post pics to flickr of, you know, their 8 year old niece or whatever to flickr and having to subsequently take it down when they realize that some fucktard found it sexually stimulating.. I have this awesome picture of my friend Vernon’s daughter and her friend richard at a swimming pool that I photoshopped (well, GIMPed) to make them wearing superhero costumes. It’s fucking awesome. But I’ve never posted it, because I had doubts about even that. Which is just a damn shame.

Creepy dudes: ruining it for the rest of us.

I am doing Project365 again, though less obsessively this time. But I’ve gotten in the habit of taking pictures every day so much that it’s not really that big of a deal. But I did miss the discipline in it, so what the hell, doin it again.

UPDATE: Now with non-broken links!

My flickr favorites are awesome, you should check them out.

I’ve opined about homeless and street photography before, so I’ll merely pose this as a question:

Does focusing on panhandlers and paying them $2 for a picture make it better or worse?

I’ve got mixed feelings, but there’s something vaguely unsettling about it to me.

This might be the best picture ever:

Full size

From shorpy.com

I have been thinking about making a concerted effort to actually revive my blog in some capacity. Not sure what that’ll look like. Here’s a picture in the meantime:

I learned where a pair of hawks live on 1st, last week. (”learned”, here, means “nearly shit my pants when one swooped out of a tree 3 feet away from me”). So I was out stalking them with my longer lens a few days ago. I didn’t think I got much since they were chillin’ on a pole rather high up, but when I got home I really liked the look of this shot. These are undoubtedly the hawks being introduced to combat the Pigeon Problem in Nashville, though this one had just finished feasting on a poor little mouse — who, along with the hawks, are the only current residents of our ill-fated Sounds stadium site.

This picture is proof that cool clouds make any picture better.

This is awesome.. Someone modified an old Polaroid 95A (for which they don’t make film anymore) to use standard 120 roll film using … legos.

I’d be half-tempted to try this, except I don’t have much motivation for playing with film these days. But I did see one of these cameras on craigslist this week. They are tremendosly cool looking.

A few interesting things:

• I signed up for Capture Music City. It’s some thing the Tennessean appears to have built for submitting photos, which will be selected based on popular rankings and published in a book. I am generally very wary of these “SUBMIT YOUR PHOTOS AND BE PUBLISHED!!!” offers, because it sounds cool, until you do a cursory value analysis. It’s not that I anticipate making large amounts of money (or any at all, in fact) from my pictures — it’s my hobby after all. But that doesn’t mean I want to be complicit in giving someone something for free — which is essentially what a lot of these offers are.

  They put out the call for free submissions in a “contest” and voila, they have a bunch of photographers sending them pictures to use, for free, in a book they can sell. Everyone wins. The only upside to you as a photographer is the publicity and name recognition — which, for a majority of these contests — is virtually nil. So, everyone wins except you. You just gave away your crap for free. The Tennessean, though, for better or worse is a ginormous publication, so they’ll at least have more exposure. So what the hell.

  So, I uploaded a bunch of crap. Go vote for all my crap. I tried to upload a selection of my pictures that were related to Nashville in some way (which is tricky if they are portraits or something). Go check it out and upload any pictures you might have. Oh, and also, when you participate in these contests, you need to be careful to read the fine print on the terms to make sure you’re not giving away ownership to your work or anything. In this case, their terms of service specify:

  You also hereby grant to us a royalty-free, non-exclusive, worldwide right to copy, edit, adapt, distribute, perform, display, and/or use, the Materials, including any derivative works created from the Materials, in whole or in part, for use in the Capture Music City book, Capture Music City DVD, and promotion related to the Capture Music City project. In addition, you grant to us the royalty-free, non-exclusive, worldwide right to use your name, likeness, and biographical information in connection with the use of the Materials.

  “Non-exclusive” is the important part — it means they are reserving the right to do whatever they want with your picture, but they’re not trying to own it. Very important.

• nashvillest.com has launched — go check it out.