This weekends, weekend one comes from the Sunday walking street market in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This market is a great place to spend some time and take photos, especially if you are there early and there is still a bit of light to use. After dark the vendors all use fluorescent lighting so there are still many photos to be had but fast lenses become increasingly important.
I have been out of the game for a long time. A new job has kept me from things I would much rather be doing. Knowing that I have decided not to sign the contract and continue for the year. Instead I will be photography, maintaining a number of websites, and teaching part time at the University of Chiang Mai. The last week has brought about a lot of changes and I have found that my general quality of life has gone up now that I have found the time to do the things that I really want to be doing.
Posting has been very slow this week. I have been offered a teaching position at a new school that is to open in Chiang Mai in May of this year. I will be teaching P.E. which admittedly is a far cry from photography and will interfere with my photography in ways that I can not imagine. Included in that, is the ability to maintain this blog.
I am going to keep the blog going, but posting could and most likely will slow down and become sporadic from this point on. I do have a reason for this however and in the long term, it will allow me to become a better photographer. First of all, it will allow me more money, money for travel, for gear and with this simply to take more photographs. Secondly the job comes with six weeks of paid holiday time in the summer. While I won’t see many days off until sometime in 2010, it will give me the opportunity to travel long term each year. And being situated in Thailand there is a lot of travel and thus a lot of photography that I can do with six weeks paid holiday.
It will also allow me to free myself of my student loan, which has been hanging over my head for the last five years and seriously inhibiting my ability to excel as a photographer simply because I don’t have the ability to travel as much as I would like to. If I can stick to my budget, I will be able to rid myself of this burden within two years. And from that point on I will be very free to travel.
I apologize in advance for the changes that will bring to this site and to my main site, www.ryanchappell.com but I will try to keep as much new material coming as I am able.
This weekend one is just a little bit of a teaser from my recent trip to Krabi province Thailand. I have a full week of photos that I will be sorting through in the next couple of days and posting on my main gallery, keep checking back they should be up by late this week.
This weekend one is from a long time back. Nearly three years back in fact and from the last time I was in Krabi province of Thailand. I post it now because tonight I head down to Krabi again for a week of rest and relaxation. Ok, so I will be shooting too but that does not mean I am not going to enjoy it. I have a lot of ideas of what I want to shoot this time around and I am hoping to get a lot of shots that I have simply not been able to get before. Primarily I am looking for shots of the long boats moored at the white sand beaches with the limestone rock formations that Krabi is famous for rising out of the ocean at either end of the beach. This is a common scene down in Krabi yet I have not been able to capture it before. Mostly because I have not had a wide enough lens to get close to the boats and still maximize the landscape but also because I did not have a polarizer last time I visited Krabi. This time I am prepared and I am hoping to come back with a good deal of photos I am happy with.
So the posting this week is going to be sparse. In fact I really doubt I will be posting at all but please enjoy the rest of the site and don’t forget to drop by www.ryanchappell.com and have a look at the galleries.
Have a good week.
With all the talk recently centring around Canon’s Powershot G10 I thought I would post this weekend one for my fiancé’s compact camera, the Powershot S5 IS. I am pretty impressed with the quality of this shot, especially the native sharpness of the .jpg images. I am less impressed by the amount of noise that is present at higher ISOs and in my opinion this is a deal breaker with cameras such as this. The G10 has been getting a lot of billing as an SLR killerl of late due to it’s compact size and extremely high quality images at low ISO. The smaller sensor size however means that once the ISO is bumpped in low light conditions, digital noise will really start to rear its ugly head.
I really noticed this on the S5 IS, shots from ISO 80 and 100 are quite good and in the acceptable range, though there is no RAW shooting ability on this camera and .jpg artifacting is visable even at these low ISOs. Above ISO 100 though, the noise becomes very prominant and very distracting.
So what do I think of all the hype about todays line of compact cameras as “SLR killers”? I think that for those photographers that want a camera that is small and compact enough to throw in your jacket pocket, yet still produces amazing images much of the time this might just be something to add to the kit. That is the catch though, it is a camera to add to the kit, not one to replace it.
The weekend one is a bit late again this week, I have been finding it hard to keep up with things lately but as the old saying goes, it is better late than never.
