After a long break from serious photography, I’ve recently picked up a camera and poked my eye up to the viewfinder with real intent and it feels great. Except for a two year stint with a Sea and Sea underwater film camera, I’ve been using nothing but point and shoots for nearly two decades, despite having studied photography in college back in the days before digital.

If my camera de jour had an auto or program mode, I set it and forgot it but I’ve been bitten by the photography bug again and I’ve been trying out some more complex and capable units, starting with a Canon G10 compact and an EOS1000D DSLR before ending up with a FujiFilm S3Pro DSLR. I miss the romance of film and all the tactile processes involved in the processing but I’m loving the flexibility of the digital format (and Photoshop of course).

I’ve already bought a few accessories like a sturdy camera bag and a reasonable sized CF card (my old 256Mb wasn’t going to cut it in a modern camera) but I’ve realized that I missed out on the most critical of kiwi photo accessories – a pair of gumboots.

As a foreigner who lives in a modern city, I’ve never quite understood the national obsession with the gumboot but after repeatedly sinking into the slop that is the Herne Bay beach (ok the Herne Bay mangroves) and sliding around muddy Mount Albert like a hefty and graceless ice skater, I think I’ve gotten the picture. Winter in NZ demands gumboots, end of story.

At least I’ll have more time to process my shots if I don’t have to spend twenty minutes scrubbing muck from my shoes or hiking boots after every photo session, so the overall image quality has to improve.

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