Once upon a time I had a ‘real’ camera: my beloved Canon 35mm Rebel, with a spiffy 300mm lens that let me get in real close without getting in anyone’s face. Oh how I loved it, though it meant carrying a camera bag with me whenever there was a chance of scoring good pictures. And, of course, it meant having to develop a bunch of film at the end of the day.
I don’t know how it is in other parts of the world, but the price of film development kept going up and up and up here that I began to hesitate before I took a photograph, unwilling to press the button until I was absolutely certain I wanted to get that particular shot developed. Eventually I wasn’t taking any pictures at all!
I then bought a fujifilm finepix thing that looked almost like a real camera, but wasn’t. Digital cameras then were still incredibly expensive and utterly crap, but as far as what was available within my price range, it wasn’t too bad. Back then having 6x zoom was something ’special’.
However, as is typical of brands these days, one had to buy exactly the right attachments and powersupply, and, as is typical of brands these days, they were ridiculously pricy and liable to break – often. Not long after bringing home my $80 power supply that let me take pictures without sapping the batteries, it died, and then the batteries kept dying, then I lost all interest in using the damned thing.
That would have been the end of the story, had I not heard of the Canon 400D, the digital version of my precious Rebel, that would mate happily with the few attachments I already had. But, as fate would have it, I needed the money that would have gone into that marvelleous device for something else, and it remains a pipe dream to this day.
Last year, in a fit of exasperation at yet another pre-paid mobile phone ran out of credit, and I found I’d fallen out of love with the clam shell design of my plastic piece of crap, I decided it was time to shop around for a new phone. My virtual tour of Dick Smith Electrical gave me a good idea of what pre-paid phones were available at the time, and I did some investigating into the SonyEricsson k800i, since it boasted something called ‘CyberShot’ that piqued my curiosity.
It didn’t take long to decide that was the phone for me, and it was purchased post-haste and became my constant companion. I very quickly fell in love with the interface, the design, and, oh yes, the wonderful pictures it could take for me, on the fly, straight from my pocket or purse. I called it Gremlin, and it served me so well for many months of random outings.
The end of 2008 introduced me to a new SonyEricsson phone available with my provider: the SonyEricsson C905. A brief phone call ensued and a week later I had my Gremlin upgrade, affectionately dubbed Scout.
This blog is a gallery of photographs taken with my mobile phones, with very little, if any, retouching aside from resizing for the web.
These are the adventures of Gremlin and Scout!