Just Shoot | Nick Found: London | Road Test

Introduction.

This up-date is a little different to my usual travel posts. I have reached this weird half way point (well technically nearly two thirds) in the trip and due to a British Airways/Finnair logistic/flight path issue found myself in London for two days. As I am not treating this as part of my trip, it is more like being stuck in limbo, I decided I could not be fucked carrying around my dSLR and all its lenses and really wished I owned a Lieca M9. However, I then remembered blowing $7000 on another (any) camera body was a dream and not soon going to become a reality. So I did the next best thing, borrowed my sisters Canon S95 point & shoot.

Main Body.

So it felt a little weird walking around with a point & shoot, kind of like roaming the streets without pants and feeling very much like the tourists I hate. However, it really wasn't that bad (personal image aside). Now, this camera is bloody brilliant! As far as pocket cameras go the experts at B&H in New York tell me its the top end unit before getting into that weird mid ground between the 'throw it in your bag, lets go clubbing, OMG Myspace' size and 'holy shit this backpack is getting heavy, I really should have left the 70-200 at home' size. Back to the S95 though, I first started using it in Auto, but soon got bored of the simplicity - the shots were pretty decent, however, just a bit to flared and not what I knew this camera was capable of. Manual though came up trumps. One is able to play with the same settings available on a dSLR so total user control was no problem. I also loved the 'scene' settings which allow you to switch between things like Fish Eye, Vivid Colour, Tilt Shift, Nostalgic, Panorama, and more I can not remember. I had a play with most of them and the results were great. I would not sell up all me gear and rush to the nearest online store to get one, however, I would happily (on occasions) leave my kit at home and use this. I have never found a point & shoot that I liked, let alone one I would use to accompany my dSLR, so thanks Canon!

Tangent.

Sunflower seeds are not something I think about often. There was this dude who drove a trolley - well actually he was the brake man - in San Fran who ate them. Quiet guy, not very helpful, I bought a jacket just like his, it is brown, very warm. Whilst in London though, I took the yearly trip to Tate Modern (which one must do to stay up-to-date with contemporary art) and there was this exhibition there by a Chinese conceptual artist named Ai Weiwei. Standing on the overpass looking down the Turbine Hall one sees a field of sunflower seeds. I judge before reading of course, "what a lot of shit, art these days is rubbish, study design." I then read the board, it says: Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique. However realistic they may seem, these life-sized sunflower seed husks are in fact intricately hand-crafted in porcelain." One cannot begin to imagine how many hand made, hand painted seeds are down there, luckily there is a clever info graphic to tell you - Over 100 MILLION. Now standing down on the floor of the Turbine Hall, the size of this installation really hits me. One cannot actually begin to try to explain with words the size of this piece, see photos below (they don't really do it justice either).

Conclusion.

This was a long post I know, however one would assume that if you made it this far you are probably part of a minority (I would have skimmed it at best!) so well done! The beauty of it is there is now not much to say. Below are a series of photos from the Canon S95, these are as they came from the camera, no editing (bar cropping and straightening - I had a cross-eyed day) so see what you think compared to the previous posts. Regards.

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