This is a story of ”I wouldn’t normally do that kind of thing”:
Since my holiday, I haven’t been the least bit interested in taking any new pictures. In fact, I had almost settled on skipping August entirely and just wait for September, which is one of my favourite months. But on the bus home, I was looking at the overcast skies and suddenly became inspired for some landscape photography, of all things! In flat light like that? No problems, the wind was calm so I had high hopes of producing some images by the lake. So I packed the camera and tripod and cycled to Loossjön and enjoyed the unusual pleasure of cycling on the shore, thanks to the low water level all summer so that the muddy shore is now packed hard. There is also a lot of driftwood scattered all around, so I concentrated on those as there was just enough wind to spoil the reflections on water.
While I was planning my compositions, it occurred to me that these roots are very graphical and should work fine in black and white. There wasn’t much colour in the first place, just a little bit of brown in the sand but still it’s very very unusual that I would even consider B&W. When have you last seen a B&W picture from me? I rest my case.
So I kept shooting, until suddenly the camera wouldn’t fire the shutter. In fact, it wouldn’t do anything at all. I removed the lens, battery and memory card, but still nothing. Did it finally break down? While I was pedalling home, I was thinking about my strategy in case the camera really was broken. I figured that I had two options – send the camera for repair (and wait for weeks to get it back) or give up on it and get a used 350D or 400D while waiting for the 40D that Canon is almost sure to release soon. But when I got home and started troubleshooting the problem, it turned out that it was nothing more than a glitch in the memory card, so now my strategy is to just simply wait for the 40D. I’ve seen the rumoured spec sheet and I’m actually not that impressed by it, but the 3″ LCD sounds good… Apart from that, my wish list contains a channel histogram and ISO 50. We’ll see what the actual specs will look like… but the big LCD seems to be a sure thing anyway.