ZED: you have posted some beautiful photos on this site. What camera did you use to get those rich shots?

Thanks!

Hi Alex...I hate to disappoint you, but most of the recent images posted to this forum's Photo Gallery were taken with a point & shoot Panasonic Lumix (10 mb). As others have noted, it's not the camera per se, but the eye for what works compositionally on the fly and the time of day or shading situations when colour choices are more saturated and subtle.
The Mac I-Photo program can digitally tweak those colours.

Earlier images from the Minding Jamaica...from Afar series were shot on Khodachrome slide film using a small-bodied Olympus OM 35mm SLR body with mostly 28mm lens.(really close to the subject)
One of the true masters of modern photography was Henri Cartier Bresson, who mostly photographed with a small Leica Rangefinder camera, which he could practically palm and allowed him to shoot quickly and intimately to the extent of breathing or stepping with his inadvertent, soon-to-be collaborating subjects...also coaxing out chance encounters.

I'm writing this from Paris France and working on a Folio of related images (you might call that a theme) and I arrived at a scena where I felt an aesthetic emotion, but needed something or someone to break into the plane of the photograph. I waited Zen-like for over a half hour for that luminous moment to happen. If I had been lugging a heavy, intimidating 35mm telephoto camera aound, I'm not sure whether I would have reacted to what Cartier Bresson called the decisive moment.

I am joy-ed that I waited and the muse-gods rewarded!

Alex...there's another brand of Photography that has gripped the Art World as of late, seriously conceptual and roaming the museums of the world, advertising, and cinema for its inspiration.
Enter the Land of the Staged Photo, which can involve some big budgets, casting, equipment & post-production processing.

Here is a LINK to some of the grandest players in that field:
Cindy Sherman; Jeff Wall; Gregory Crewdson

www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1592850,00.html

Zed: thanks for taking all tis time. Lumix, eh? exactly what model is that 10mp one? I have been shooting for some time with the FZ28, which I love, though i sometimes wish it had a pullout rotating screen like the similar model Canon has. And the noise at ISOs over 200 is a bit of a pain. Panasonic doesn't have that down right yet.

I do know the work of Cartier Bresson, and I'm well familiar with the stuff Cindy Sherman puts out, though i don't know Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson.

Do you have an email you're willing to post here?

Zed waiting for Zen, eh? :-)

Thanks!

BRAWTA:: A Bit More on Photography By Way Errol Morris:
“Believing Is Seeing” reveals itself as really (albeit implicitly) about how it feels to sustain the search for truth in an infinitely complicated world.

In “Believing Is Seeing,” Morris explores and refines our most basic way of understanding the world, which is also a plea for attention, an invitation to communal experience, an expression of urgency, an exclamation of wonder and one of our first, most important and most enduring requests of each other: Look! In “Believing Is Seeing,” Morris explores and refines our most basic way of understanding the world, which is also a plea for attention, an invitation to communal experience, an expression of urgency, an exclamation of wonder and one of our first, most important and most enduring requests of each other: Look!

LINK:
www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/believing-is-seeing-by-errol-morris-book -review.html?hpw

Alex: I'm a bit "casual" with the technics of photography, so you're better off hitting-up on someone else who'll talk your ear off on dem tings. (FYI: Panasonic DMC-253)...as far as em goes, I treasure my anonymity...all-right?

As for photography and its encounters, I think that the Bard got it close to right...when we look-a-bout:
(In the voice of Marianne Faithfull...)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Zed: I hear you about anonymity; it's my bag, too.

Thanks. Onward and upward with the arts!

Zed I saw a rainbow while driving home this evening and wondered about the best way to take a picture. What type of camera would you suggest to capture such a distant image?