some photos I took with my first travel camera

When I first got into photography, I started out playing around with disposable cameras, and shooting film but I also had a little compact digital camera as well. When I decided it was time to upgrade it for something newer and more advanced, I picked the Kodak Easyshare C613.

It was a big upgrade on my little Fujifilm compact, with a 6 megapixel sensor and a 3x optical zoom, my Fujifilm didn't even have a zoom! And it was the camera I used to teach myself more about photography; understanding how exposure composition worked, playing with shutter speed e.t.c. But it was also the first camera I took on holidays and when I went travelling.

This is a replica of the HMS Bounty shot, I think, somewhere in Torquay, Devon, but I took this in 2007 and my record keeping wasn't great back then... ! But definitely somewhere in Devon! Point being: the C613 was my first holiday snaps camera, and I took some really nice photos with it in Torquay that year!

Like these penguins at Living Coast which, to this day, is still one of my favourite photos. I loved my little C613 as it was super easy to carry around and as I learned more about how it shot, I learned to tweak the settings slightly to get the best out of the photos I shot with it.

I was only 18 years old when I took these photos which, feels like a different life time ago now 👴🏻 but it was the camera, alongside my Olympus OM10, that I grew up and learned photography with. And it went on quite a few adventures with me.

When I started going to gigs and wanted to get into band photography, I took my C613 with me, and I got this shot of Frank Turner at the Kasbah (or Colosseum) in Coventry. It also went with me to HMV in Birmingham where I saw Foals play an instore in 2008!

And it wasn't just gigs or holidays that I carried it around for, sometimes I just took it with me to photograph stuff in the local area, like some derelict barns on a farm near where my parents live.

I used my C613 regularly for about 4, 5 years, and it wasn't until I bought my first DSLR that I stopped using it, but I still kept it around even after my DSLR was my daily driver. Spotted a frog in our back garden once so naturally rushed out to photograph it! And the C613 was just to hand at the time

And when the local supermarket down the road was being demolished I shot some photos of the works going on to send to a friend who was documenting development works in the local area on a newsletter blog.

Unfortunately my original C613 broke some years ago, but it was such a good camera that my Mum had the same one! The black one in that first photo, so occasionally I used to borrow hers again to mess around with. And when I moved out, she let me take it with me, so I'm now on my second C613! And it's still a great camera to shoot and use today. The movie record function is not the best but with a 6 megapixel sensor, and a whole host of manual features you can still take photos perfectly suitable for sharing online or even printing upto 12x8 size prints! I entered a few into local photography competitions back then like this one of cows by Coventry canal surviving a heatwave snap.

If you ever see one of these cameras in the wild for cheap, or stumble across one online, I definitely recommend picking it up. One of my favourite cameras I've ever used and one I still like to pick up and play around with today.