Historical interest – Page 5 – anevolvingscientist.org

About Sydney

Although I was born in Melbourne, I grew up and was educated in Sydney. Apart from my career taking us to Melbourne for nine years, and England for one, Sydney has been my home base.

When we talk about Sydney, we are talking about the State Capital of the Australian State of New South Wales. Indigenous Australians are believed to have been in the area for over 30,000 years. Founded as a British Colony in 1788, with the arrival of the First Fleet, Sydney is just 225 years old this year!

The largest city in Australia, with a widespread metropolitan area, has a population of over 4.6 million distributed over 12,144 km². It is a multicultural society, with the original British & Irish stock long since diluted by migration, from Europe, especially since WWII. Subsequently, we have seen significant migration from our Asian neighbours and the sub-continent.

Sited on and around Sydney Harbour (along with San Francisco and Rio de Janeiro, one of the most attractive harbours of the world), it is a city that grew, sometimes without planning. Streets have many hills and bends which add to the visual charm but can contribute to traffic chaos. Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened in 1932 with six lanes for cars and buses, two each for trains and trams. With the demise of trams, an extra two lanes were made available to motor vehicles. When the Sydney Harbour Tunnel opened in 1988, adding 50% to the capacity for motor vehicles, it was predicted that we would be back to the same level of congestion within 20 years. 25 years later, with congestion worse than ever, there is no plan yet for any additional crossing into the city!

Two of our most recognisable visual attractions are the Sydney Opera House, opened in 1973, and the Bridge referred to above.

The Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge (aka “The Coat Hanger”) seen from the Harbour (above) and a Harbour Ferry loaded with spectators for New Year’s Day (below)

A Tall Ship on parade on New Year’s Day 2010 (above) and the modern City (below)

Many of us, when advocating the beauty of Sydney, first talk about the Harbour. The various ferries transport many people to and from work as well as providing a valuable tourist service. However, many of us rarely see the Harbour, let alone travel on it! What a privilege it was, then, for our grandson (aged nearly eleven) to sail a mirror sailing dinghy with one of Sydney’s most experienced sailors. That’s them in the picture below, in the green boat with a red, and a pink and green sail. While I have been on the Harbour many times in various craft, our grandson is the first direct ancestor or descendant in the family to actually sail on it.

Continue reading “About Sydney”

Early Days

An evolving scientist, supervising a distillation experiment, at a school open day c.1958

A Lifetime of Technical Evolution: Part 4 -The Camera

The following is not intended to be an exhaustive or authoritative treatise on the development of the camera. Rather it is my personal trek through cameras I have owned.

Growing up in the 1950s, I recall some friends had a Kodak Box Brownie, perhaps the most popular camera for a generation. However, when I was considered sufficiently responsible, I was handed down a quaint ‘folding’ camera with bellows. I have a vague recollection that the bellows were renewed for me, because light could get in. Unlike the Box Brownie, which used a cartridge 120 film, 60mm wide, my camera used 127 film, 46mm wide. It took many photos, black and white, of course. The number of photos was restricted by the number of exposures on a film. That camera might have been worth a fair amount today, as a ‘vintage’ camera, but regrettably, it was sold years ago.

The pictures above, scanned together, show the relative size of prints taken from 127 film (the house where I grew up) and ‘postcard size’ from 35 mm film (a derailed train near Gordon Station c.1961)

Around the time I left school, I was very excited to acquire my first 35mm camera, a Yashica YL (above, photo courtesy of flickriver.com). It had a compensating viewfinder, so that mostly the picture finished up framed as I intended! With this camera I had my first experience of colour, usually in the form of colour slide film, but most often it was used with black and white film.

Ten years or more later, I bought a Canon Canonet QL (above, photo courtesy of mattsclassiccameras.com), which was the first camera I owned with an auto-exposure facility. With this camera, I happily travelled overseas for the first time, and took many 36 exposure colour slide films. Both the Yashica and this Canon had manual advance and rewind mechanisms.

So far, there is evidence that I was not always a slave to fashion. However, this is the point in my tale where rapid evolution began. It wasn’t until about 1997 that I owned a single lens reflex (SLR) camera, a Canon EOS 500N (above). I clearly remember purchasing it, duty free, as I was about to set off on an overseas holiday. For the first time, I could appreciate the benefits of an SLR camera, and it wasn’t long before I had a 75-300mm telephoto lens to use with it.

In 2000, passing through Hong Kong, I bought a digital camera, a simple Kodak model (1 megapixel) that the salesman persuaded me to purchase. I would sooner forget my experiences with that camera, with which I managed to delete most of the photos I took of a friend’s wedding. Sadly (not) I accidentally dropped it, and the battery retaining latch broke in such a way that it was no longer usable. Time to move on!

After a garden tour of New Zealand where I consumed many rolls of 35mm film in my SLR, I saw the wisdom of converting to a digital SLR (DSLR). My choice at that time was a 10 megapixel Canon 400D (above). Armed with a suitable backpack, many trips ensued with this latest camera and a couple of lenses.

But, you can’t put a DSLR in a pocket easily. So it was that a small compact digital 3.2 megapixel camera, Sony DSC P7 (above, courtesy of www.imaging-resource.com) was added to the kit. What a lot of fun we had with this, photographing gourmet food at dinners as well as garden panoramas when the battery in the DSLR ran out before day’s end. Eventually, that camera would see out its life with one of my daughters.

In 2010 I was to take a trip involving several train trips as well as flights, and I decided to ‘travel light’. That meant the DSLR and associated kit was to stay at home. This was the time to opt for a relatively new entrant to the market, a 10 megapixel Sony DSC HX5V (above, courtesy of www.sony.com). As well as being a pretty good compact in every other way, this camera has a GPS facility, so every photo has a reference point on the globe. What a great little camera this has been, and still is, with the counter well past 4000.

The only thing lacking is a big zoom lens! Watch this space………

So, in just this lifetime, in the hands of an enthusiastic amateur, we have progressed from the very simple film camera to a great diversity of options. The range goes from the very basic ‘point and shoot’ digital, to quite sophisticated compacts, to affordable DSLR and beyond. For the latter, there is a bewildering array of lens options: wide angle, telephoto, fish eye and macro to name a few. One of the major highlights for me, is that with digital cameras, we can see immediately if the shot is successful. If not, take another before the moment passes. That is a great improvement on only finding out our mistakes when the film returned from the developer.

All this, and no mention of the mobile phone. The simple reason is that the mobile phone is another story for another day.

Footnote: Before emigrating to Australia, my paternal grandfather is listed on the 1911 UK census as a “photographic mechanic”. Perhaps there is a genetic strand to my more recent interest in photography.