Tuesday 5 February 2008

Taking the high road



Its been 2 years since we last went skiing, and I love the mountains more than the sea, especially the French Alps on a clear, nothing beats it in my opinion. Realising how small we are in amongst the panorama which stretches to infinity is truly a wonderful experience. Of course, I carry my camera with me, this time I brought along a Canon IXUS compact which is a bit faulty, and the Ricoh GRD2 (minus the GV2 viewfinder, just in case I'd loose it in the snow!)

Of course, as luck would have it, my MacBook died on the way down! I had the ''sudden-hard-drive-death'' syndrome which I found out later is a widely reported known failure of certain MacBooks and MacBook Pros. This meant that I only had about available to me 1.5Gb of pictures to store in both my compacts with no where else to dump the files, I had only to be selective and careful of what I shoot. Actually, this became an exercise, like shooting say 4 rolls of film only, back in the old days. Mind you, one can always buy film or memory cards at the supermarkets or tabac stores.

The skiing was wonderful and the food was great, but since this is a photo blog, I won't necessary go into those matters, suffice to say I found my ski-legs once again, and got hooked a second time round. Being middle-age is fun.

Then the worse happened. On my 4th day, the 256MB Sandisk II SD memory card in my IXUS got corrupted! I could no longer take snaps anymore, and since I only took RAW in the Ricoh which ate up megabytes like crazy, I was stuck between a rock and a snowy cliff. To cut a long story short, I had to compromise and shot smaller files with the Ricoh. It wasn't such a big deal as holiday snaps don't need 10MP, where 3MP would do just fine.

On the mountains, I noticed there were many lovely derelict stone huts dotted about. These were probably old farm stores that used to house grain or animal feed. I love the texture of their weathered wood and stone constructs, and experimented with the GRD2's high definition lens and in black and white. Here is one from a series I am still editing.

I am also working on another series of images of trees which I will post soon, again working with the GRD2 and the 1:1 format in black and white, below of which is a teaser.





3 comments:

Pak Zawi said...

Steven,
I came here byway od AZAIG. Love your site on first sight. Will be coming here more often. Please allow me to put you on my blogroll.

svllee said...

Hello Zawi, thanks for dropping by. I just started blogging on and around photography and how it helps me in the process of doing my job, be creative and sharing my thoughts. you are most welcome!

zorro said...

Steven, it has been some four years since a trip to chelsea and a holiday in st.Moritz offered to me and Karen has not been taken up. You take on skiing reminded of of this offer from my niece in UK. Have to seriously plan this overdue trip. the ski chalet in SM has not been sold I heard.