Epilogue of Sydney Trip June 2005

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During this trip, all of the pictures where taken with a Kodak DX6490. This is my first attempt of documenting the whole trip with a digital camera. There are some benefits and catches along the way.

Firstly, credit goes to the sharp images and nice contrast from this Kodak built camera. It is also much more lighter than my near-to-extinction Nikon F50 SLR camera. Weight is a very important constraint for a backpacker who is attempting to travel as much as possible with foot. The powerful 10x Schneider zoom lenses mounted on this Kodak camera is indeed very useful for (my humble attempt to) creative photographing.

However, the focusing system of this build is not perfect. I had made several mistakes by focusing the wrong object. It is not as straight forward as a SLR camera when trying to focus some tricky foreground/background object. The focusing system and the image processing are slow as well.

The lenses are not 'wide' enough. Naturally, I missed the 24mm wide angle lens of my Nikon SLR a lot. Nevertheless, for general usage, the Schneider lens are very satisfactory.

Another common problems with a digital camera are battery life and memory limitation. Unfortunately, I was faced with both of the problems in this trip. These problems can be easily solved with a portable battery charger and having access to an internet cafe.

Other minor problems are limited aperture range (f2.8-f8.0), limited exposure range (1/1000-16"), and very rough pixel at ISO 800.

Since this was my n-th [where n>1] trip to Sydney, I had attempted to avoid taking typical postcard shots (as I had attempted in the previous trips). However, this sort of avoidance proved to be difficult. My subconscious tended to drive myself walking to a similar spot, taking similar pictures as my previous trips.

Lastly, an advertisement for my DeviantArt web page goes here. Interesting bits are categorized under 'photography'.