I used to write on this blog a lot about my digital cameras and photography. Back then I took a lot more photos and even had many thousands of them published online. However in recent years my focus for photography as a hobby has waned and I took down virtually all of my online photos, in part because of a bad experience with Flickr. Be aware if you are outside the US you have no rights as such on Flickr, and barely any more if you are in the US. Their customer service is terrible. The problem I had with them was someone discovered my photos and apparently filed malicious takedown requests for some of them. Flickr did not notify me of these requests as they are required to do and as would be an obvious courtesy, and I had no knowledge until I happened to be scrolling through some of the online albums and noticed the “image unavailable” graphic had replaced some individual images. In the US Flickr is required to follow the correct procedure and let people know as people can challenge these takedown requests but this law does not apply to other countries and it appears Flickr has decided not to notify users outside US and they do not have any ability to challenge or reverse the decision. This discovery led to me taking down all of my Flickr albums and as it took a lot of work to put them there in the first place I am not prepared to put them onto another photo service. I use a Flickr site with NZ Rail Maps to share some resources solely because they can be downloaded at full resolution, and most of the actual maps are stored on Google Photos. I do put some albums onto Google Photos where I want to share them with people that I personally know such as school or church functions.
Apart from that I also take less photos in general and as a result I don’t spend as much time or money on cameras these days, unlike the time in my life when I replaced one of my cameras almost every year, although many of these were cheap cameras costing less than $200 and because they had taken thousands of photos in that time they had been well used.
Currently the main cameras I use are a EOS 600D DSLR and a Powershot SX260. The DSLR is very good and reliable. The Powershot has been very good but now has developed a problem with the automatic shutter over the lens jamming. It can be nudged fully open but is a liability when it doesn’t completely open and you don’t notice. This has been a pretty good camera apart from these issues and I have had it about 5 years and have had the EOS 600 about the same length of time.
I am looking at a Canon EOS M series as the replacement for the SX260 although they are relatively bulky, it is still a smaller camera than a DSLR with the body being about the same size as the SX260 folded up, the lens is the bulky part but it can be collapsed. The EOS M100 is the current replacement for the M10 I mentioned earlier and is available in NZ through official Canon channels unlike its predecessor. With a APS-C sensor the imaging and video performance is very high quality although possibly a little below the EOS 600D. However the 600D has problems when shooting video that causes it to only be able to record for about 10 minutes at a time, some sort of inherent technical limitation. I would be very surprised if the mirrorless camera had the same problems and expect it to be able to record long video clips. The usage of the EOS M would be similar to a DSLR with manual zoom, which of course has advantages with video due to lack of noise and being able to control the zooming speed. The ISO ratings can go very high and it has a 24 megapixel output and full HD video. I will look at buying one of these if I can find some way to squeeze the necessary dosh out of a stone as I am a bit skint at present. Being a more compact camera than a DSLR is important for me so that is one of the drawcards.
What has been good lately has been taking photos for church events and I hope that will pick up in future as it was something I used to do more of in the past and did wane in recent years but it looks like that would happen more often now.