World in digital

It was bitterly cold. The wind was howling from the east. Except for the low sandstone ridge to the north, all around me the rolling grassland stretched to the horizon. blesbok were nowhere to be seen. Lying in short grass on a hilltop, with the big Contender hunting pistol in my hands, I was getting restless. Then some zebra and eland came around the northern tip of the hill. I waited in anticipation; I knew the blesbok would soon follow, and when they did, I would be prepared. B ut when the blesbok ram eventually lay at my feet, I realised I wasn’t well enough prepared. It was a magnificent trophy and had the longest horns I had ever seen, but I had no camera with me, and today, I have no photo of it. Its horns measured 18” – only 2” less than the world record at the time, shot 50 years earlier and ranked #1 in Safari Club International’s handgun category. I’m not a trophy hunter, but over the years I’ve shot five animals that have qualified among the top three for each species and I have a photo of only one of them. It’s not that I didn’t have a camera. For over 30 years I had a great Nikon SLR. Add-on accessories kept it modern, but like all of us it grew fatter with age. Motor drives, light meters, flash guns and tripods to support the ever-growing arsenal of bazooka-like lenses eventually made it so bulky that my interest stagnated and I seldom had it at hand when needed. Evolution of a revolution In 1925 leading microscope manufacturer, Leitz, revolutionised photography when it introduced the world’s first “miniature” camera. It began in 1913 when Oskar Barnack, one of the company’s employees, built a little gadget he could “carry in his overcoat pocket” with which he could snap pictures. It was the prototype of the world-famous Leica. At last an active photographer was freed from the huge ground-glass screen camera, tripod and black hiding cloth used at the time. ut recently a new revolution loomed. It came in the form of the digital camera. It could do everything a film camera could, and more. At first I didn’t realise this and resisted the switch. Only my friend Sarel Retief’s unrelenting insistence and the instant availability and cheapness of taking photos eventually won me over. I soon rediscovered photographic exhilaration I hadn’t known for years. Some digital cameras are even smaller, flatter and lighter than the original Leica. Although some have a zoom capability from wide-angle to 200mm telephoto, they can be carried in one’s pocket while hiking, fishing or hunting. I opted for something slightly larger with more telephoto capability. It had to be capable of taking just as great bird and wildlife photos as the Nikon. A tall order, but Panasonic’s Lumix FZ5 with its 12x zoom and five mega pixels seemed to be the answer. Imagine that by adding a single factory teleconverter I could zoom from wide-angle to 760mm with the flick of a button! No wonder these cameras are called “super zooms”. Its lag time was so short I could photograph a bat in flight. I thought it was the ultimate. Being a competitive industry, I’m sure other manufacturers produce similar super-zoom cameras of equal quality. How to spy on your next-door suburb T he problem with digital cameras is that just as you get what you thought you wanted, a new one shows up that can do what you thought was impossible. Within months the 10 mega pixel FZ50 became available and although larger and heavier, it had the unique feature where if you decreased the mega pixels, the zoom went up to a maximum of 21x. If you combined it with the teleconverter, you had 36x optical zoom, which equals a 1 200mm lens. For an amateur like me these two cameras make a terrific combination: the FZ5 which is constantly with me, is light and fast and the FZ50, which is only 20cm long with the converter lens fitted, produces extreme distance, print quality photographs. I may never bag a trophy buck again, but if I do, I’ll have a photo. – Abré J Steyn Contact Abré J Steyn on 083 235 4822 or e-mail [email protected]. |fw