take my camera everywhere

The worst camera is the one you leave at home. It doesn’t matter if it’s a beautiful piece of kit, if you don’t have it with you, it’s useless. Although I love my DSLR, I very rarely take it with me when I do everyday things, like going to work. I have tried to make an effort and take it with me more often lately but the improvement has only been marginal.

I could take my Olympus compact camera with me as a substitute but as I said before I am generally disappointed with the results and it has a few quirks that make it annoying to use.

So I decided to take the bull by the horns and bought myself a new toy this week: a Leica D-Lux 3. Although it is classed as a compact camera and is light and small enough to fit in my jacket’s breast pocket, it packs up some impressive features that you would normally expect from a good DSLR. It allows complete control over all the parameters of the shot and the only times so far that I have been reminded it was a compact was when taking pictures at an ISO setting higher than 400, when the image comes out with a lot of noise.

I now have no excuse anymore not too achieve this goal. Between my DSLR and this new toy, I should really be able to take a camera with me everywhere and take good pictures.

Quite often with photography, taking an interesting picture is a case of being in the right place, at the right time, assuming you didn’t leave your camera at home. Taken on Saturday at Waterloo station, eastbound Jubilee line platform.

I do want to take my camera everywhere but as it is an SLR, it is bulky so it might not always be practical. I should start by taking it with me when I really can like today when it would have enabled me to take some cool shots in central London.

I could take my compact one instead (no, the camera phone doesn’t count) but I am invariably disappointed with the results I get with it.