An old brick of a camera
and a 31/2” memory card
Wall painting at ceiling level in ruined C14th church in an orange grove – nr Koufos, Crete, July 2002
- Height above camera approx 20+ft
- Natural light
- 10x optical zoom
border added for this setting
Spent some time today going through old archived photos; and yes, some of them are on floppies. Why, you may well ask. Well they were taken with a Sony Mavica, the type that used floppy disk memory rather than the one that wrote directly to CD. I remember coveting one of the CD cameras once-upon-a-time. Those were the days. I still have an older Mavica FDC-MV7, which I think is a smidgen longer, top to bottom, than the one we took with us, and a little bit bigger, too.
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The days in question for us were in July 2002 and the brick came with us to Crete. We’re talking mostly 640×480, 96 dpi and 24 bit depth images. We got 20/21 images per disk at 640, which means by the end of a 2 week trip you’re carting at least 2-3 boxes of floppies.
Occasionally, I seem to remember, a whole disk would be used on a single ‘fine’ photo. One way and another, it was a remarkable camera, with an amazing 10x optical zoom, anti-shake and incredible colour quality. Although chunky, it felt steady in use and gave you a sense of certainty about what you produced, but carrying it around in the summer was a job and a half. If you ran out of memory, almost every business you passed had disks. The images will enlarge when clicked on, but they come up smaller than the modern photos above.
We tend to visit archaeological sites and museums and so here’s a selection that I think shows the capabilities of the basic settings of this old friend. Added to the naming of each shot is an abbreviated version of any adjustments made to the images today, though these, if any, are mostly small histogram adjustments and, excluding the top image, only one on which a little colour enhance has been done. So if you hover over an image it should tell you where it is and what state it’s in. I still marvel at the depth and range of colour the Mavica brick produced.
Ancient sites and the odd church
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Around and about
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This last image is an olive tree
Museums
These are included because the old Mavica was particularly good at taking images through the glass cases, unlike a number of digital cameras I’ve had since.
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theinfillclicks 