I've been taking photos on a regular basis since 1964, originally on film, and since 1998 with a digital camera.

On this page you'll find:

The cameras

Scanning negatives

Using these photos

Higher resolution photos

NOTE: I'm currently in the process of restructuring these photos. In particular, I'm moving things from one directory to another, and things might be bumpy for a while. If you don't find what you're looking for, consider changing directory, from the old http://www.lemis.com/grog/ to the new http://www.lemis.com/grog/photos/ or vice-versa.

The cameras

In the 60s I was really interested in photography, and spent a lot of my parents' money on cameras. Over the years I have had:

• Pre-1965: a simple 35 mm camera that my father, also a keen photographer, had bought in the early 50s. It had a 45 mm f/2.8 fixed lens and a shutter with about 1/25 (sic) to 1/250 s speeds. Some of the photos were taken with a screw-on “telephoto” lens that doubled the focal length and caused serious vignetting. I can't remember much else about the camera.
• In July 1965 I got a Pentax SV SLR with a 55 mm f/1.8 Super Takumar. Like all SLRs of the time, it didn't have through-the-lens metering, but I did have a clip-on external meter which conveniently made it impossible to attach a flash unit at the same time.
• In June 1966, I sold the SV and got a Pentax “Spotmatic”, the first SLR with through-the-lens metering, and thus, I think, the first SLR with any kind of electronics. It has a 50 mm f/1.4 Super Takumar. Apart from these details, it is very much like the SV. I still have this camera.
• Starting in 1966, I started carrying two cameras with me. The first “second” camera was a FED, a copy of a Leica III with a 50 mm f/2.0 (Leitz) Summar lens. It also had a genuine Leica III top plate, and was sold to me as a Leica. I didn't find out that it was a Fed until I tried to sell it to a camera dealer. It wasn't a very nice camera; bottom loaders are a real pain, whether they're genuine or not.
• In 1969 I gave the Fed to a girlfriend and bought an Edixamat II (I think), then later traded it in for a better quality Edixa. They were mainly interesting because they had interchangeable viewfinders and used the same lens thread as the Pentax. The second was stolen from my car in Milano in September 1976.
• In August 1992, I bought a Pentax Z1 with a 28/85mm f/3.5-f/4.5 zoom. Somehow I have never used it much. It's strange that over the years cameras have become effectively less sensitive. In the mid-60s I used films with sensitivities between ISO 125 and 400, with a maximum aperture of f/1.4.
• In July 1998 I bought my first digital camera, a Casio QV-5000 SX, one of the first affordable cameras with 1 megapixel. It lasted about 8 months before failing. I sent it for guarantee repairs, which took 6 months; it arrived back unrepaired. The second time I sent it off was the last I ever saw of it. It never came back. I won't forget Casio for that treatment.

  In retrospect, the camera wasn't much good anyway.

• In October 1999 I bought a Nikon “Coolpix” 880, with 3 mexapixels and a decent lens. It is quite a nice camera, but slow, and it is particularly bad at rendering skin tones: it makes people look as if they have been drinking excessively the previous night.
• In November 2004 I bought a Ricoh Caplio R1 digital camera with 4 mexapixels. The advantages it had were that it had a real wide angle lens (corresponding to 28mm on a 35 mm camera), and that it was very fast. On the down side the flash exposure was pretty terrible, to the point of being useless on some occasions. Still, I was happy with it until I dropped it on the floor in the cathedral in Amalfi, which it didn't survive.
• The next camera is a 6 megapixel Nikon “Coolpix” L1, which I bought in a hurry in Amalfi after accidentally destroying the Ricoh. It has many advantages, but also the slowness and poor skin tone resolution of the Coolpix 880. It doesn't have any wider angle lens than average, either, and strangely, it also doesn't have any way of adjusting the sensitivity: it's stuck at ISO 100.
• My latest camera is an Olympus E-510 SLR with 10 megapixels. At the time of purchase it was very new on the market—the examples in the instructions show dates a couple of days after I paid for it—and it was the only SLR camera on the market with both image stabilization and composing via the LCD monitor (which they call “live view”). It's amusing how times have changed: 50 years ago SLRs showed images through the viewfinder until the photo was taken, and then it went dark.

One thing that surprises me is that low sensitivity of modern cameras. The “film” sensitivities haven't increased—even digital cameras with adjustable sensitivity tend to opt for ISO 100, and at the ISO 1600 that some of them offer, the quality is pretty terrible. On the other hand, they seldom offer lenses with wider apertures than f/4. At f/1.4, my forty-year old Pentax Spotmatic is three stops more sensitive, so using it with an ISO 400 film would compare with using a modern digital camera set to ISO 3200. And in those days, I really did do available light photography with films pushed to ISO 1600, corresponding to ISO 12,800 on a modern camera.

Scanning negatives

I'm currently in the process of scanning in my old negatives and slides; I bought a Canon “CanoScan” 9900F scanner for this purpose in 2004, but it did not live up to the advertised capabilities. In 2007 I bought an Epson “Perfection 4990 PHOTO”, which is better, but not completely satisfactory. I'm still looking.

Using these photos

If you like these photos, you're welcome to use them for non-commercial fair use. I'd appreciate it if you contact me before doing so. I find things like abuse of my personal photo by the Birmingham: It's not shit project to be neither non-commercial nor fair use.

The photos on the web have been optimized for display on the web: even the high resolution versions typically have relatively high compression, and they're made brighter and have more contrast than the originals. If you need a photo for other purposes, I have more natural and less heavily compressed versions available.

Higher resolution photos

The photos are stored on the server in a hierarchy of three different resolutions. If you look at the thumbnails, you can click on any photo and go to the next larger size; click on that one and you'll get the photo at original size, scaled to fit the screen width. If you click on it again, you get the same image at its original size, usually much larger still. The “thumbnail” and “small” sizes are a fixed number of pixels, regardless of the original, so sometimes, when photos have been aggressively cropped, you'll find the “small” photos to be larger than the original. The original still has the best detail.

On occasion I've heard from people who want to access a high-quality version of the photo, but don't know how to do it. Here's the text of a “how to” that I sent on one such occasion. The URLs relate to that particular occasion, but they're as good an example as any.

In the example I'm assuming that you're using Microsoft's “Internet Explorer”; you can check this at the top of the window, after the name of the URL. If you're using a different browser, it shouldn't make any difference, though things may look a little different.

1. Starting at the photo index, select a thumbnail link, say for Sunday, 24 September 2006.
2. In that page, click on the photo you want.
3. You'll get a new page with significantly larger photos. It should be positioned on the photo you selected, but you can move around if you want. Pick the photo you want and click on it again.
4. You'll get a photo that fills the screen width. Click on it again.
5. This time you get the original image. In most cases, it'll be larger still, but sometimes it's smaller. Either way, this is the one you want, since it's the original.
6. Select “File”, then “Save as” and specify a place to save the file. Even though it looks small on the screen, it will be a full-size image.

If this still isn't enough, or if the photos appear too brightly coloured (they're optimized for web display), please contact me and I can probably find better versions for you that aren't on the web.

Why call such big photos “thumbnails”?

When I started with digital photography, “high” resolution meant a resolution of 1280x960 pixels, somewhere between 1.1 and 1.3 MP, depending on how you count, and I called the smaller photos “small” and “thumbnail”. Since 1998, resolutions have increased: my current (2007) camera has a resolution of 10 MP. The smaller sizes have increased too, so now the “thumbnails” are 225x300, not what one would call thumbnails any more, but I can't think of a better term.