Photo and Video Gallery

We are in the digital age, but in reality digital cameras and post processing are newborn infants since the time of the first tin types and various contraptions used to capture an image. I used to shoot 35mm movies at Nevada City bike races in the 70's as a kid like playing with a new toy, and while I fiddled with various cameras for years, I never really took it seriously until the digital camera age came in the new millennium. I bought one of the first prototypes around 2000, a middle of the line Fuji, and it was a curious novelty which I used for fun at the first races I shot around 2005.

This was about the time digital DSLR cameras were starting to get serious and by 2005 the improvements in digital cameras were indeed impressive. After that time, I became more serious about shooting bike races. I've been following women's cycling since the first race for women at Nevada City in 1978, and Nevada City is considered the oldest race on the west coast, but I believe there is yet an older race on the East coast, might be Somerville but I continued to follow women's cycling into the 80's and 90's with Jeannie Longo and most notably Leontien Van Moorsel who was in various cycling magazines at the time.

Note: Of course there are older races worldwide for women then Nevada City. For instance the women's world road championships started in 1958 but Nevada City was probably one of the first or oldest professional women's road races in California at the time.

Being busy all the time in my trade and career job, I didn't really have the time to shoot bike races and it was a huge hassle to have the prints developed from the photo shops downtown compared to what you can do today, plus what on earth would I do with those photos? There was no internet back then and I had no idea that shooting photos and saving the negatives for years down the road for a historical internet archive could be so cool, but looking back I am sure we all wished we did! Remember also, there was really no easy way to get your photos into cycling magazines for latest edition. Compared to today, it was the dark ages!

I've been learning and upgrading my skills and equipment in small increments. I ditched my Fuji after a couple of years for a Sony point and shoot with a Carl Zuiss zoom lens. It's a great little camera, but it doesn't support raw so you have to really try hard to get it right the first time since it's so unforgiving in post processing. However, I shot some great photos with that little gem. I used that camera for a couple of years before saving it as a back up camera before stepping up to a full DSLR Sony which allows the use of any lens I want or need.

While the P&S is great for some shots, it served its purpose and with Adobe new Lightroom plus a new wave of graphic processing apps out there today, DSLR cameras are stealing the limelight since the marriage between hardware and software seems to be a good one! I am using middle of the line DSLR equipment and that's pretty good considering I am pretty savvy with post processing graphic software and computer science has always been my thing since the 80's. I don't know if I will ever move to the top line DSLR equipment or even consider if that is something I want to do since middle line equipment works so well. Middle line is much more lighter to carry around, and the cost is only a fraction of what top of the line equipment costs.

Also one must consider how much they use such equipment and the abuse one throws at such a hobby, and going for top line equipment means it's no longer a hobby but a serious profession. I always thought once something becomes a professional job, that takes all the fun out of it, and that is not what I want to do to have fun! Another way to look at it is trying to achieve great results with limited equipment like with my P&S, but the latest 2010 photos show that this equipment serves the purpose very well.

I think learning where and how to shoot great photos is an art and in the end, a really great photo is going to be more one of skill, luck, and just happening to be lucky enough to of been using the sweetest spot in the camera's settings and its lens all at the same time. Upgrading to the best camera and lens in the world is not necessarily going to do that for you.

What I do think is cool is the progression of photos over the years, like a Nickelodeon experience. You can go back five years and see not only what photos looked like back then from cheaper digital cameras in their infancy but also it's nice to see both the progression of your skills and the improvements in camera technology over the years. Of course that includes post processing software, but it's not a bad thing to see old plain photos that are neither snappy, colorful or sharp looking back in those days.

It's like reading or looking at old yellow aged newspapers that you had in the closet for 30 years. In a way, they have their own spice, and to a collector or a hobbyist, those old photos are as priceless or more so then the latest cutting edge photos with all their glamour and glitz. The reason being is simply because you have them! I am sure there are so many photographers today that are kicking themselves thinking if only, like the famous Titanic saying "if only", if only I had shot photos of all the things I cared about back then, I could still convert them and share them with the world today!

Note to that Post Processing software is really late and new to the game. Chicken and the egg thing, but Lightroom only came out a couple of years ago, and before that Photoshop was incredibly pathetic compared to Lightroom. Lightroom have opened the floodgates, but also there is a new wave of even more cutting edge graphic software out there, which I have only have time to sample and use. Finally now, software for post processing is catching up with the hardware, although the time needed to work on photos in post processing is appalling, and not something for the everyday camera enthusiast.

Cheers!