The Pacific

In 2007 I bought a Canon Powershot A450.  This was a point and shoot entry level digital, with a 5Mp sensor and very little manual functionality. This turned out to be an absolute gem,  and sold me on Canon. The images from it were really snappy, and went up to 2592 x 1944.

I took it with me on a trip to Vanuatu, and the photographs were great. They were not technically perfect, nor was my framing and composition perfect.  But I was getting a lot better, and the camera simply took away all of the worries and fiddling.

The photos were better then I was getting with a Pentax istD.

Part of the reason was back to light.  In the tropical Pacific paradise of Vanuatu there was a lot of light, and it was clean light.  The colours were vivid and bright. The ocean was a mass of blues and turquoises, the flora and fauna was a range of brilliant greens.

After the initial visit to Vanuatu I was offered a two year contract working around the Pacific. It was an opportunity not to be missed, and I wanted to utilise the trip to improve my photography, and to keep the memories.

But photography on remote atolls isn’t quite as easy as it sounds.  I was warned that the humidity, the fine coral sand, the salt mist the general hard life of travelling soon wrecked cameras. I needed a cheap camera that would take decent photographs and wouldn’t  break my heart if it fell in the ocean.

Removable lenses were clearly out – I didn’t wast fine dust or humidity getting in.  I also didn’t want anything to big, to avoid attention from subjects, to avoid being stolen, and to make transport and carrying easy.

I initially bought a Canon SX120, a small DSLR lookalike with 10 Mp, 3648 x 2736 image size, and the equivalent to a 36-360mm 2.8-4.3 lens fixed to the body

I took some great photos with this simple automatic camera.  It would just go in  a pocket, uncomfortably so, but it meant hands free.  It survived boat trips across lagoons. Dropped on sand, used my village children,  left in bars when I was drunk, and a host of other indignities and it kept on taking great photos.  

Not perfect photos.  It’s not a perfect camera. But they were faithful reproduction of what I saw, they print out at up to A4 and look perfect, and I was happy with them.



Later I wanted a longer zoom and HD move capability, so I purchased a Canon SX1.

I still have this pocket rocket – except it really wont fit into a pocket, and is like a shrunken DSLR.  Still 10Mp, and 3648 x 2736 sized images, but this time a CMOS sensor,  and a far better lens – the equivalent to 29-580mm F2,8-5.7, fixed to the body.  And it will shoot full 1080p HD movies.

If the image quality was any better than the SX120 then I couldn’t spot it, and didn’t need it, but the increased functionality and capability made it far more useful.

Sadly the SX120 eventually secured to sand.  The lens iris started jamming and the focussing sounded like a truck pulling away in low gear.

The SX1 is still in use.  I don’t have a lens that can mach its 580mm reach.

These two cameras stayed at my side for two years in places like Vanuatu, Fiji, Kiribati, Tonga, Solomon Isles and Tuvalu. And they gave me 25,000 photographs and hundreds of hours of video of life on these remote islands.