Photography



DJ: My first digital camera was given to me by my father just before I went to Stony Brook University. It was a Point and Shoot camera from Casio: Exilim Z4 (4MP with 3x zoom). Roughly 3 years later in 2010 I bought for myself another Casio P&S camera: Exilim Z2000 (14MP with 5x zoom).

When I went home in 2011 I gave the E-Z2K to my father and he still uses it, though not as smoothly as I'd like. So I returned to Stony Brook with no camera in hand and had to start (re)searching for a new camera. I decided to go with a 'new' camera system instead of well-known DSLRs and bought a Micro-Four-Thirds camera from Olympus: PEN E-PL1 (12.3MP) with the standard kit lens (14-42mm). After a while I added Panasonic's 45-200mm lens to my 'camera bag' too. This camera served me well for ~3 years and I have decided to stick with the MFT system in the foreseeable future.

In December 2013 I sold the E-PL1 along with its kit lens (still have the zoom lens) and bought (let's say in 2014) Panasonic's MFT camera: LUMIX DMC-GX7 (16MP) with the thinnest 'kit' lens then (14-42mm with letters 'PZ' thrown somewhere in there) till Olympus released a similar lens few months later.

So that is my photography gear for now and I hope you can instinctively relate the photos that appear on this blog to these as and when necessary. Just a reminder: My section won't see any updates anytime soon because I have promised my superpartner that I won't be spending any more on cameras and 'accessories' for the next 5 years. (Let's see how long I can keep up with that!)



SJ: You know when you like it. I liked the movies / TV shows where people clicked animal life, where people used binoculars to look at mountains or a temple at a distance. So I have liked photography since childhood and I thought it would be very interesting if I could click some nice ones myself. My father bought me a camera in the 3rd year at college because I convinced him that I want to capture moments of my final years. It was a P&S camera by Canon: PowerShot A550 (7.1MP with 4x zoom). I was among the first ones in my college wing (12 noble people staying together) to get a digital camera so it was used a lot by many of my batchmates during the final year.

When I started to work, I bought another one by Canon: PowerShot SX220 (12.1MP with 14x zoom) with decent configurations for that time. I did not use it for long because I was gifted a Panasonic LUMIX DMC-ZS20 (14.1MP with 20x zoom) by my Superpartner. He says that after this one I can aim for buying a LUMIX LX100, which will almost be an upgrade from P&S to MFT.

But what I bought in 2017 was an Olympus' OM-D E-M10 Mark III (16MP) with two lenses (a Kit lens 14-42mm and a Zoom lens 40-150mm). There were a few reasons why I bought it. 1) I was relocating to India from China and thought of buying something which when lifted would bring the fond memories of Guangzhou and the beautiful places I have visited while in China; 2) No better place to buy than where it is manufactured/assembled; 3) It was launched in 2017 by Olympus and was in my affordable range and the specs seemed almost right. Since then, we have taken Mark III along with us and taken some nice photographs.

I might not have grown from a novice to a beginner in terms of taking pictures. But I am definitely better than those people who look at the world from their cellphone camera's eyes and do not think enough (or at all!) before taking pictures. I can proudly say that a photograph is a story to me, a story without text, a story with or without faces, a story with no audio yet speaking a thousand words.

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