Where the road goes?

Clouds over a field, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Edit and update: I read this posting a day later and only then noticed that I had used the word "shoot" in the meaning of taking a photo. In the view of the school shooting yesterday this is of course quite ugly. I debated whether to change the text or to let it be. Better leave it, as this shows how the meaning of a word can change overnight. You can probably guess that the implications of the school shooting hadn't yet penetrated when I wrote this.

After shooting lots and lots of photos during the last week or so - and actually through all of the summer - I have felt increasing difficulties in my shooting technique. It is not due to the new camera. It is a development where my old approach to photography is no longer working.

Many previously routine ways of doing photography don't feel right any more, and there doesn't seem to be on offer any direct way to improve. It feels like hitting the wall, no longer full speed ahead.

But probably this is another learning experience for novice photographers. It is getting more difficult to develop, and that feels hard.

However, I did some photography even today, and among the waste there were a couple of frames worth keeping. Luckily we had again a sunny day, which did pose some problems for photography due to the intense light, but also made the autumn colors even brighter.

It seems that weather in Finland switched completely: we had a rainy week (or in fact a rainy summer), and now we are having a nice dry spell.

It seems that in camera equipment there are promising developments happening. In digital SLRs Canon is getting some territory back with the new version of 5D. Canon G10 may be up to the challenge after all (but perhaps a bit noisy). And then we have a Sigma DP2, a big-sensor compact camera. This is the way to go.

Even Fuji has awakened, and is promising a compact camera "better than F31fd", whatever than means. As the F31fd had basically only one selling point - the excellent high-ISO behaviour - I hope Fuji improves on the other fronts as well.

But I'm learning to like my LX3 even more, although there are nagging small problems also once in a while. However, usually these turn out to be misunderstandings about how the LX3 should behave, and I'm learning to adapt.