Point and Shoot!

I've never actually mentioned that I really like photography. I guess I always found it interesting, looking at images and their detail. But I got hooked when someone started talking to me about a brand called Lomo, short for Lomography. Now, what's special about Lomography is that it's not digital. It uses film, and nothing more. Everything is basically manual. And then I became really interested in it, and wanting to learn more, looking for more cameras and the like until I finally bought my own.

I purchased a Lomo LC-Wide for myself, which I find very convenient because its super light! Doesn't weight a thing! You can make multiple exposures, take pictures with a square frame or even half frames! The shutter doesn't make much noise, and of course...it is incredibly wide angled. You can be very near a subject at a distance as close as 0.4 meters and you'll be able to capture a lot more of the surroundings than you thought. This can be a good thing and a bad thing. For me, well I like wide angle and all but I sometimes just want to take a picture of a certain object...not everything else as well...when you take pictures with the LC-Wide, that particular subject will appear to be smaller than it actually is...think of it as the view mirrors on the sides of the cars that usually have a sticker that says "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear".

That was a year ago. After that first purchase into the world of analogue photography, or like others put it...film photography, I've been taking pictures very often and I've had the opportunity to test other cameras as well, even trade my own for another to use a certain amount of time. I had the chance to test out a camera called Petri TTL, which was made around 1974. Way older than I am! It was great, I had little to no problem with that camera! It was my first SLR camera, and my LC-Wide is not exactly an SLR camera. You really can't change the aperture, focal distance, nor the shutter speed to your liking (shutter speed is automatic and it has only to focal distances: near 0.4-0.9m and far 0.9-on).

After a while, I came face to face with a camera I had never seen or heard of before...a Canon AL-1. Whenever I mention that camera, people respond "Don't you mean the Canon AE-1?". I was originally looking for the Canon AE-1's less popular counterpart, the Canon AV-1 because it was aperture priority. I really wanted to be able to control the bokeh effect on my pictures (the blurry effect on the background contrasting on the focused object). Then I found this Canon AL-1, in which you can control both the aperture and shutter speed but can also place the shutter speed in automatic. I was there, the camera was there...I had to get my hands on it...

It's been great! It was in perfect conditions to start with! Now, enough reading and lets get to the pictures!!!

These are a couple of samples of the LC-Wide

Here I took a picture holding the camera from my lap...very close...yet I was able to capture a whole lot of the sky!

It's perfect for taking pictures of bigger subjects which you would otherwise have a harder time with other cameras!

    
Landscapes look great with this camera, due to the wide angle!

With the Petri TTL, which is an SLR camera, I was using lens that allowed me to take pictures close to my subject and to make them look as big as I wanted!

Get as close as I want, and change the depth of the bokeh!

And after playing around with the borrowed camera I finally got my own SLR! I'm very happy! I still have to get the hang of it though...