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Most recent gallery additions:
07.27.07:
Some of my photography bookmarks on the world-wide web - stuff I've found useful, inspiring and/or interesting:
Reviews:
Tips and Advice:
Other photographers' work:
Technical stuff:
Photo gallery software:
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Photography is a hobby I've been interested in ever since I was very young, since well before I actually had a camera of my own. Perhaps it was because of my fascination with the intricate mechanical gadgetry of my dad's Canon SLR, all knobs and dials and switches and mysterious, purple-tinted lenses. Perhaps it was because, in the wisdom of his parenthood, I was allowed to do no more than heft it in my little - and potentially clumsy - hands, under the my father's watchful eyes, and marvel at this glorious symphony of metal and glass. After all, it is the forbidden object that arouses the most wonder, is it not? Be that as it may, I contented myself with reading through its instruction manual over and over again, learning of the intricacies of aperture, focal length and shutter speed, and dreaming about the day I'd have a camera of my own. Years later, when I was older (and more responsible!), I was (*sometimes*) allowed to use my parents' other camera, an autofocus, auto-exposure, auto-flash, auto-rewind, auto-wind, auto-everything automatic, and I steadily built up a collection of pictures of my friends at school and college. To waste expensive film on anything else was, of course, the eighth deadly sin. The first camera I had of my own was an Olympus Trip AF 30 , bought for 30 dollars (or something like that) at K-Mart when I was nineteen. It was a very simple camera - autofocus, fixed focal length (34 mm), fixed aperture (F5.6), fixed shutter speed (1/125s) (Gasp! How did I ever manage?!), but it was a good paintbrush for a gumshoe photographer, and it was then that the wannabe artist in me started making its voice heard. The folks at the CVS in downtown College Park *very* quickly got quite used to my coming in every few weeks with a new roll of film to develop... That camera's era came to a close some years later, when, on Spring Break in London, I gave it to a random passer-by on the street to take a picture of me in front of some landmark and he dropped it while handing it back to me, breaking the battery compartment door. Duct tape held it together for only so long, after that. And so I moved on up to a Fuji Discovery DL-320 Zoom , also a film camera (38 - 120mm), which, after a number of years of excellent service, I accidentally left behind on the Los Angeles subway. Luckily, I had changed to a new roll of film just before leaving Universal Studios that evening, so I only lost a couple of snaps. Otherwise, I would have been *really* upset! Quickly getting exasperated at the atrocious performance of the disposable cameras I was forced to temporarily make do with, I joined the revolution and bought my first digital camera, a Canon Powershot A70 (an absolute gem of a camera!), and that, naturally, was when I really gave full rein to my itchy shutterfinger. (This , btw, was the first picture I took with that camera, in the parking lot of Best Buy. Didn't get very much work done that day, I tell you! :) ) But I still wanted more zoom... I *had* to have more zoom!! So last August, after lusting after it for several months, I upgraded to Canon's second-generation superzoom, the Powershot S2 IS . (First picture with that camera!) 12X optical zoom (432mm equivalent), *and* image-stabilized - yeah, baby! I've been meaning for years to post, online, galleries of my favourite photographs, in addition to the usual ones of friends / family / occasions / vacations, but just never got around to sitting down to go through the gazillions of jpegs on my hard drive and pick out the best ones. Until today. :) So - here they are! Hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed taking them... and please, dear viewer, feel free to contact me with any comments, critiques and/or criticisms - I'd love to hear from you!
Jason Pereira
July 9, 2006: Update: Galleries relocated! I have (temporarily, perhaps) moved my photo galleries to Google's new Picasaweb service, HERE. I say "temporarily" because, although there are *several* excellent features with this new offering from Google that make it a better option than hosting the galleries on this umd site (wonderfully easy integration with Picasa, slideshow view, keyboard-cursor-key navigation between pictures, the ability for viewers to add comments, display of EXIF data, RSS feeds to alert you of any updates, and a clean, uncluttered [webpage] layout that is the hallmark of Google products... wow, this is coming off as quite a plug for Google, isn't it?! :D ), there are still some things that I'm not quite happy about. For example, viewers need to also have a picasaweb/google account to be able to post comments. (If you don't have one, and would like one, you can sign up here.) Also, I can't change the background colour from white to anything else, like I can with the simpler galleries that I used to create before with Picasa (the pictures look so much better on a black background, as you can see with these older galleries: Botany / Birds / Beasts / Bugs / People / Machines / Vistas / Miscellaneous). In any case, that's where my pictures now are, and that's where the new ones will be added, so do check them out, and, as always, if any of my pictures move you, do speak up and let me know. |
