A New Camera!

fuji
Originally uploaded by andreinafrica.

Since I started with shooting digital images, it's been with a Polaroid i532. A modern-day Brownie, if you will. Although it HAS impressed the hell out of me, I needed more. More reach, more tuning, more speed. So, after researching the class of DC's called super-zooms, or bridge cameras, I took out the plastic. Strangley enough, although I had done my homework and knew that the S5600 Fuji was what I wanted, 'cos I'd seen and handled it at the photog shop in Glenfayre, and 'cos it had a really fast shutter response, and 'cos it looks sexy as all getup, the Kodak Z740 was instantly available, at the right price and used SD cards, which I can get at ridiculously low prices... So I bit the bullet and went to the Hyperama down Atterbury in Menlyn, ready to buy a Z740... Now, it needs to be said, the camera counter at the Hyperama, is a strictly Kodak affair. Kodak kiosks, Kodak bags, Kodak camera's...exclusive. Getting there, I was immediately acosted by a rent-a-salesman, who threw a spanner by offering me a Z650, which appeared to be identical to the Z740..except 6.1 megapixels (vs the Z740's 5.0 megapixels) and a Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon lense (vs the 740's Kodak Retinar aspheric all-glass lense). I hadn't researched the 650 and was dithering a bit, when out of the corner of my eye, under a keyboard on the display case, I spied a black-bodied camera, and out of curiousity, lifted the keyboard. There it was. My Fuji S5600, and at a better price than either the 650 or 740 Kodak's. The only non-Kodak camera in the store...and exactly the one I wanted... freaky. Needless to say I gabbed it. When the universe slaps you, you pay attention, k?
The verse is a corruption of the classic prayer invoked by generations of American jar-heads, as they learned at Paris Island and other great US Marine Boot-camps. It was featured in "Full Metal Jacket" by Stanley Kubrick.
Off to shoot. Later.

And so it began....

OK. So I've done it... I have a blog.