Digital Rust

For me photography at it's best can capture defining moments in history and evoke some very powerful feelings. At worst it is mundane, execrable and instantly disposable. It can also act as a powerful ( and subversive ) driving force in many aspects of daily life. Millions of products from hair colour to expensive cars are essentially sold to us off the back of pictures and through advertising.

Fortunately millions of people take pictures for altruistic, experimental, scientific and artistic reasons amongst others. Camera technology has matured to the point where almost anyone can buy a relatively cheap consumer unit and with some software and a computer produce incredible photos. If you get chance to have a look through any of the big online repositories such as Deviant Art or Flickr I am sure you will be as astonished as I was to see what people from all around the world are producing, on the whole, for non commercial purposes.

So off I went to my local camera store and got hold of a relatively cheap DSLR and the additional lens that was on offer at the time. The Camera was a Canon 450D and the lens a cheap Tamron, I will add more details about these in the Hardware / Software section shortly. I asked a few friends to help me organise paraphernalia that goes with producing some of these pictures, however most of it was very basic point and shoot stuff.

I have assembled a few sets of photos below that are meant to be a refection of the flexibility of current cheap consumer cameras and software. Much as I would like to produce exiting and evocative pictures, sadly I doubt this will ever be the case, however I have been surprised at what this camera is capable of. It has spent many hours in hostile environments bolted to the side of my telescope in the depths of freezing English winters. Spent even longer hours in hot sweaty music venues taking pictures of bands, bumped around the country in my rucksack strapped to the motorbike and generally lived a fairly rough life.

Click on the "expand" box icon of the slideshow controller for a larger view.

I have had endless discussions with people about the best choice of dslr to buy. I currently own a Canon EOS 7D and Canon 450D.


I went with my Canon 450D with a view to strapping it to the end of my telescope, mainly because the CMOS chip that does the front end business is inherently low noise. The DIGIC 3 image processing engine has a reputation as one of the finest and it has the all important LIVE VIEW mode. I am not saying this is the best camera in the price range however it does more than can be expected for what I paid. All the astrophoto's on my website have been taking using this camera.

It powers up in just under a second, has exceptional battery life between charges, has a nice 3 inch LCD display with clear and idiot proof menu's and the 14 bit / pixel RAW file output is lovely.
I am not going to wax lyrical about the camera suffice to say I highly recommend this if your planning on doing any astrophotography work. It seems very capable at the studio stuff I have tried and has survived an alarming number of drops and knocks !!

Here is a link to my flickr web space