Ever since I was a child, I’ve always enjoyed taking photographs. My first camera was a little disk camera where the film was on a wheel. Obviously to anybody reading this today the concept of having only a dozen and a half shots and you had to take the film to a shop to get them developed is archaic beyond believe, even more so considering that even the most primitive mobile phone has a digital camera. The introduction of social sharing mechanisms such as Facebook and Flickr (and many more) has transformed the amateur world of photography into something quite fantastic.
I currently have a small 7.2 megapixel Sony DSC-200. This camera was given to me as a birthday present some years ago to replace my 35mm Canon EOS and has a Carl Zeuss lens with a very good macro facility. It was selected specifically because I took lots of pictures of miniatures and the combination of high quality lens and macro mode made this camera perfect for close up, high detail photos. This camera has done me proud and still is a lovely point and shoot piece of kit. However earlier this year I replaced my mobile phone with a Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro which has a 8 megapixel built in camera. The photo’s from this are fantastic for work in progress shots and providing the light is good enough actually in cases better than my DSC-200 although it’s not possible to mount it onto a camera or adjust focal lengths and similar.
After Games Day I decided that I wanted to take some decent photo’s of my Golden Demon entry, so borrowed a Nikon D7000 from work. This £700 camera is an amazing bit of equipment and the pictures are fantastic despite the fact that the set up was quite hastily put together and wasn’t lit as well as it should have been. Because of this I’ve begun to research into getting myself a digital SLR camera. Although I can borrow the work camera as often as I want, it’s generally in use over weekends and it really needs to be in work during weekdays.
Speaking with my sister’s other half, I’m currently looking at getting myself a second hand Nikon body, most likely a D5100 as pictured at the top of this post. This is a 16.1 megapixel camera with the ability to take 1080 HD videos and a second hand body would set me back around £330, although looking around, for not much more I could get a brand new one, or one that includes a lens. I’m actually quite impressed with this as I thought I’d be looking at least around the £500 mark 🙂 Although I can’t afford to do it now, a digital SLR camera, especially one with the option to do video would be a huge benefit to me – plus would allow me to put up some blog videos of techniques and bits and bobs.