Rediscovering Photography

My first camera was a Canon Snappy EZ, a little point and shoot camera, given to me by my Dad around 1989. Pictures taken with that thing were plentiful, and whenever I was given a roll of film I would go nuts and use it up quite quickly.

That camera was even repaired — if you can believe that — because I had killed it when I put nickel-cadmium rechargeable batteries in the thing because it would always chew through the power.

The little Canon was stolen, and replaced with an Olympus AF-10 Mini by the insurance company, which ended up actually replacing my Mum's old die-hard 110-format Kodak Instamatic, and she still uses it to this day.

I moved on, however, and was given a Casio QV-11, the cheaper version of its brother, the “revolutionary” Casio QV-10. This was my first digital camera, and at a resolution of 320x240 it really didn't do very much good for anything. It did, however, produce fantastic photos that look better than some multi-mega-pixel point and shoot digital cameras available on the market today, which says something. Scott is still borrowing this camera from me, although why I'm not sure!

This camera was also interesting because it was the first digital camera on the market with a built in screen, and you could rotate the camera portion around to face yourself, which was apparently most useful for self-timer shots. The camera is more of a novelty item for historical value now and has no purpose, but back in the mid-1990s it was most useful for photos for websites. Considering the resolution, these would be called “thumbnails” these days!

Around the same time, I got my first real camera: My wonderful Minolta SR-T 101. This is a fantastic brick of a camera, and well worth digging around to find if you're learning photography. The camera has no automation, and the only electronic part is a fairly reasonable light sensor, for which I'm told Minolta won an awful lot of praise for back in the 1960s when this thing was released. This camera has since been sold, which is a little sad but I know deep down I would never use it again.

I recommend this camera for learning photography because it is so well designed it can take a beating while at the same time forcing you to learn how everything works. Most people start off with a camera that has some sort of automatic setting, at the very least auto-focus along with aperture priority and shutter priority modes, and end up missing out on useful knowledge.

Around this time, I did occasionally also use my Dad's Pentax SF7, which was quite a nice camera for its time, and my Dad had a decent range of K-mount lenses to choose from for more demanding shots.

My Minolta did a hell of a lot of service though, especially once my Dad and I built a darkroom at home for black & white film. I spent a long time in there, oddly enough listening to Hitz FM — the very station that killed the hobby!

For a while, I didn't have the time, and eventually photography faded into my past. For my travel from Australia I got a Sony CyberShot DSC-P52, which is the kind of camera that can take reasonable pictures (especially if you know how to play with the exposure settings), and doesn't crush the quality out of existence when saving the images as JPEGs as newer cameras do. I love Sony for that!

Despite being a point and shoot camera, this little thing followed me around until such time as I lost my charger and never really continued to buy batteries for the thing. I gave up on photography almost entirely.

In 2006, I bought a Nokia E70 which incidentally had a camera built into it. I couldn't have cared less about what I presumed was yet another rubbish camera built into a phone as a marketing gimmick. For this reason, I only took one photo on the thing while travelling through Austria with Scott. It was only until I started this blog that I started to realise that the picture quality from this thing isn't really all that bad for candid shots, particularly if the light is good.

The real advantage of the E70, from what I've seen, is both that it's always with me and that it has quite a wide lens — something that appeals to me because I really do like wide shots. At the end of the day, the thing is rubbish for anything beyond the blog, but it has served its purpose extremely well over the past few years.

Recently, and most particularly after my recent trip to Chernobyl, I've been keen to get myself a decent camera. After a few months of research and much soul searching, I settled for a Nikon D300 with a Nikkor AF-S DX 16-85mm f3.5-5.6G ED VR.

I've always liked shooting wide, and in low-light situations; Therefore the main reasons for this decision was because the D300's noise reduction in low-light situations looks much more like film grain than its Canon counterpart, and the lens is reasonably wide while providing a decent telephoto range for my first lens.

Sadly for me, the lens is a little slow, so I'm sure I will be complimenting this with a decent prime lens a fast telephoto in the not too distant future.

I suspect this is the rebirth of a long and expensive hobby! In the future, I do intend to provide a gallery of my work — should I ever get around to rewriting my blog software — right here on this site.

All images here are photographs freely provided for marketing purposes and are copyright their respective owners. These images are not my own.