Being different doesn't mean being disabled
By allen lindsay
22 May 2009
My father gave me my first camera. It was a KODAK Instamatic. But I'm legally blind now and I still take photos. Thanks to my NIKON D300. Which has Live View. I can no longer use my cold war PRAKTICA LTL3. Because of it's small and gloomy view finder.
The PRAKTICA LTL3 was a film SLR made in East Germany in the 1970s. Because I could no longer focus an image through the view finder, I would resort to a tape measure. Measuring the distance between me and the sudject. Then calibrating the distance on the camera's lens. Unsatisfactory.
Until the wide availability of compact digital cameras that had Live View. I was able to modernise the way I took photos. With a digital camera I could take a thousand images to take and keep one decent photo. Rather than pay for a thousand negatives to be processed at the mini lab and select one decent negative.But some times taking digital photos is hit and miss. But some of these hit and misses have been surprising hits.
Because of the endless new model releases by camera companies, a digicam seemed limiting. So I have progressed with several cameras to the NIKON D300.
The NIKON D300 takes beautiful pictures. It's APS-C sensor is the same one in the SONY Alpha 700. But the D300 is a heavy camera to wear. It's as heavy as a large cat cuddling the phographer around the neck.
The type of photos I take are of people being themselves. I think it is an honest type of photography. It is photographers who take photos like this who are recording the history of the eventful and the mundane of peoples' activities.
Many photos I have seen that have won in competitions and in exhibitions are digital art. Because the digital artist has taken a photo and has altered it in to something very different. What I do is minimal. I do crop photos.
The two photos inspire me to continue to take photos. Because being different doesn't mean being disabled.
