Following up from yesterday’s sad tale, Canon US have told me by email that if I buy a 400D from Amazon here, I’d need to return it to the US for warranty service, via a US address. This makes me considerably more nervous about purchasing a camera here.

Unsurprisingly, Canon’s UK website provides much worse service - I can’t even find an email address to check with them whether they’d fix a camera under a US warranty. I still find it amazing that companies think it’s reasonable to leave their customers without an email address to contact. I’ll probably call them on Monday to confirm, but I’m not happy with this level of pre-sales support. I’ll be taking a look at Nikon.

Which unfortunately leaves me without a way of taking pictures whilst I’m here. And that makes me a sad Andy. Anyone see a way out of this?

OK, so I’m an idiot. I broke my camera (again). And I can’t (practically) get it repaired before I get back to the UK. Somehow, breaking valuable stuff seems to be happening a lot recently. Is it possible to train oneself to be less careless? Or is it just an unchangeable characteristic? I’m not in a good mood, anyway.

Fortunately, my trip out today wasn’t really that photogenic in practice - there’s been a lot of rain here recently, and even though I drove 140 miles today (all the way up the East side of The Bay to Oakland, across the Bay Bridge, and through San Francisco), it was pretty misty and wet, and I wouldn’t have got any good pictures anyway (although I got a good view of downtown, with the Transamerica Pyramid and many of the other landmarks I remember from my last trip).

Nevertheless, I’ve decided to comfort myself by buying another thing I can break - the 400D (together with the IS lens Adrian suggested). Amazon here are doing a good price, and will probably deliver it by the end of the week, in time for next weekend. I just need to make 100% sure that the warranty covers the UK - I’m getting mixed messages from the web.

Observations on Chicago: Cold, cold, cold. It was -19 degrees centigrade yesterday evening. Fortunately the only time I had to step ‘outside’ was on the jetway. Today, the police are recommending that people in the area don’t leave their houses. It’s nice and sunny in California.

Observations on Hertz #1 Club Gold: So cool. Just turn up (2 hours late but it didn’t seem to matter), get in the car, show your license, and drive off. This is the way things should be.

Observations on American Driving: Automatic transmission: simple, just don’t forget it moves when you take your foot off the brake. Driving on the right-hand-side of the road: easier than expected. Following the instructions Neverlost gives me: harder than expected. Getting your key out of the ignition without calling the Hertz helpline: apparently impossible.

But driving here is incredibly lazy. After experimenting this afternoon with the cruise control, I know this is the way it ought to be: big roads, no lack of power, no worrying about gearchanges, no worrying about navigation, a soft and comfortable ride. I took a trip down to Santa Cruz - a lovely little town - and thoroughly enjoyed the drive in the sun.

plv has convinced me to try and use Flickr again - for highlighting my best photos. I’ve uploaded some today from the trip to Santa Cruz (and one from yesterday showing the ice across the Midwest). I expect I’ll continue to use my gallery, but probably won’t upload to it whilst I’m in the US.

After annoying myself by breaking my Thinkpad yesterday evening, and finding myself with nothing to do today, I decided to take a random break to Basingstoke and try to make a photographic record of this strange town. The results aren’t exactly astonishing photographically, but I have tried to capture some of the divided character of the place.

I grew up in Farnborough, so I’ve been familiar with the area for quite some time, and when I was younger, we used to jokingly refer to it as ‘Boringstoke’. But Basingstoke is a city of strange contrasts, unlike many others I can think of. The main thing that strikes you as you walk through parts of the city centre is 60s concrete architecture (a much maligned style in my opinion; Ernő Goldfinger showed how to do it right). However, Basingstoke has pretty parts that remind one of cathedral towns such as Winchester, Guildford, or Salisbury. It also has some gleaming, shiny parts (the Barclays building) and some unforgivingly ugly office blocks (such as Alencon House, previously occupied by IBM). It has some hilly streets that in places seemed to uncannily resemble Kendal; and a spotless shopping centre selling upper-middle-class goods and services.

What a bizarre place Basingstoke is.

It’s plain that the camera industry has seen a significant degree of disruption in the last 5-10 years, almost all of it driven by digital cameras. On the back of this, we’ve seen a huge explosion in pictures on the web (most obviously on sites like Flickr), as well as other interesting changes (such as print-it-yourself kiosks in photo shops and chemists). Amateur photography seems to be going through a resurgence - I have started taking a lot more photographs, as have many of my friends and colleagues. Whether that resurgence will be permanent is unknown, but of course the increase in the convenience of cameras (no more waiting for development, easy digitisation) is not temporary.

However, whilst digital has brought innovation to the back-end - what do you do once the picture is taken? - the front-end is still as much hassle as ever. I own a Canon Powershot S80, a high-end compact camera which aims to provide many of the facilities of an SLR on a compact. Canon have done a good job - it pretty much does this - since a lot of those facilities are only in software anyway, it’s not hard. However, it still doesn’t match up to an SLR in one fundamental way - the picture quality is simply not as good (not as clear, fringing round the edges), mostly a result of a smaller CCD and a smaller, cheaper lens. Accordingly, I plan to buy an SLR at some point in the future once I can get what I want (>12MP for less than £500 - I’m betting on two years).

It’s painfully apparent that cameras themselves haven’t changed much in size or ease-of-usage since digital photography came along. Compact cameras have got slightly smaller than later-generation 35mm ones, partly because CCDs don’t need to be 35mm in size, and partly because many viewfinders have been eliminated in favour of an LCD screen. SLRs, however, are still basically the same size they always were - and I would assert this is mostly because of the large physical size of high-quality lenses (I’m sure high-quality CCDs could be reduced in size with a bit of investment).

The problem, of course, is that there are fundamental physical limitations to do with light that affect the quality of the lens. I’m no physicist, but I suspect from what I remember learning in physics at school that these are likely to be the biggest problem. However, I’m sure that there must be more one can do to shrink SLRs (and presumably their lenses). There is of course a huge pre-existing investment in lens mountings by consumers and professionals (for example, Canon have their EOS system), which is bound to slow down the rate of change and adoption, but I for one would love to see some investment going into shrinking the whole camera. I’d pay a lot for a high-quality SLR that fits in my pocket.

Updated 2007-01-11: Bit of a simple treatment perhaps, but this guide might nevertheless be useful when determining megapixel requirements. Of course it does make a (partly) abritrary choice of 300dpi resolution.

Just so it doesn’t seem like I’m always grumbling about poor customer service, I’d like to point out that Canon have recently been very good. I got some dirt into my S80 digital camera when in Edinburgh about a month ago. I sent it back to Canon’s UK repair centre, half-expecting an argument about mistreatment. They cleaned it, readjusted some things, and sent it back to me, good as new. It took a month, which was a little longer than I’d hoped for, but they didn’t charge either, which I was expecting.

In general, my observations of Canon have been that they produce good, solid cameras (the S80 is an excellent camera for a serious amateur who doesn’t want the bulk of an SLR) and that they provide good service. I’d recommend them without hesitation.

Hannah Parker has posted a picture of us (the IBM Hursley bloggers) down the pub. That’s yours truly looking stupid in the huge Aussie hat.

(note: Hannah’s blog is accessible only from inside the IBM network, but the picture is on Flickr)

As promised, my photos from Barcelona, including the Sagrada Família and Park Güell.