Quote:
Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler
There is much benefit in having a mixture of unrelated interests. Getting fixated on just one tends to leave people akin to a gravitational singularity.
Photography for me is fast-action sports with (currently) a D6. Exercise is on top of exuberant horses.
The vintage radio/audio stuff will still be here whenever you want to dip in. It's just one more string on your bow. You've found out all the trade-offs, compromises and insurmountable limitations hidden inside products consumers paid a few hundred quid for.
Whatever field you build up expertise in, there comes a point where you feel a need to pass it on to a new generation. Arty skills like photographic composition seem longer lived than consumer technologies.
The main thing is to have fun. For me, having electronics as a hobby allowed me to explore wider than the electronics job did. Whenever things got nastily political at work, the horses took me as they found me and kept me sane (well, sane-ish). Somehow through all this I got to photograph opera dress rehearsals for publicity shots, carriage driving, 3-day eventing, and aerobatics.
David
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Well said. Thank you for enlightening me on RF in the last few years. I didn't know we have a fellow accomplished photographer here. Yeah, I can always dip in and out of the radio/electronics hobby. But when I cannot manage to do it in moderation, I have to put a hard brake on it. I always struggle with work-life balance. This forum has been a refuge for me in the last few years, particularly during the pandemic. I have encountered lots of nasty work politics lately and was unhappy with my home's clutter.
It has been over 4 years since my last photo shoot. It was incredibly weird to pick up my DSLR camera for the first time a few weeks ago after 4 years. I thought oh my God what has happened to me? Almost a piece of me has been dying inside slowly without knowing it.
Luckily I don't need to spend any more money on photography as I invested heavily in the past, and I no longer shoot action. Action photography is very expensive, I used to own those white big beast super telephoto lenses like 300mm f2.8 and I still have the Canon 200mm F1.8L. I had to travel all over the world shooting gymnastics for magazines and federations- they issued me photojournalist passes and sometimes paid for my travel expenses. With fashion and studio photography, I stopped getting hung up on getting the latest and the best gear and focused on the creative processes and teamwork years ago.
I am a few years behind with all the mirrorless technology and am shocked that the Nikon Z7 can shoot 120fps. I shot the Athens Olympics in 2004, my Canon1D MK-II had 11fps which was cutting-edge, technology, you had to have good timing to capture the peak moment. With the Nikon Z7, you just do machine-gunning with the shutter button, requiring no timing and fast reflex. But then I was using film cameras like Mamiya RZ-67 Pro II and Canon EOS3 before the Millenium. Probably the SLR cameras will die soon and with be replaced by mirrorless cameras with lots of AI technology embedded. These days everyone is a photographer with their Smartphones and Instagram filters.