At 15, my parents bought me a Minolta SLR, and I became an addict. My dad and I would take 8 or 9 rolls of film each during a 5-day vacation. We had no idea, of course, what kind of pictures we had until we took them to the drug store to have them developed. All of this added up to serious money, and we would often end up with two or three pictures that we liked enough to enlarge and frame.
When digital photography began, I was a little resistant to it. Strike that; I was a lot resistant to it. Strike that, I said I would never use a digital camera. Early digital cameras were TERRIBLE. You would have been better of taking a writing class so that you could vividly describe what you were looking at than taking a digital photo of it. They were 2.1 Megapixels. Even when I started teaching yearbook (12 years ago), I had a tiny 4 Megapixel camera that was more or less useless for volleyball and basketball. It was difficult at dances, and it couldn't zoom in at a soccer field worth anything. I found that I was still frequently using film and then having it developed onto a CD in order to use as a digital file.
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| My first yearbook camera ($110 in 2005) |
Digital photography has come a long way since those days. I now have a Nikon D3100 DSLR, a wonderful camera with 14.2 Megapixels. While this isn't the highest end camera I could own (I will never be able to afford or justify a Hasselblad for instance, and the 24-megapixel cameras that are currently available are outside of my price range), it has almost seven times more pixels than that first camera! Please also note that I am not a victim of the megapixel myth. I do know that a megapixel count isn't the only thing that affects photo quality; I use this simply to illustrate how far the technology has advanced in this short time.
The most important feature of a DSLR is the lens quality. It is actually better to invest in a good lens on a lower megapixel body than the other way around. The lens determines the stability of your image, the coherence of refractions, and the amount of light gathered. This is why I always recommend either Canon or Nikon when people ask about cameras to buy. Neither of those companies will put their name on bad glass, and the glass is important.
This leads me to my most geeky post. During Christmas break, I bought a new lens specifically with light gathering in mind. It is not about the zoom as it goes from 50mm to 150mm, but it has an f-stop of f/2.8! My lowest f-stop prior to this lens was f/3.5. If you are not a photo geek, that probably means nothing to you, but it is a big deal. The lower that number is, the more light the lens can take in. This means I can shoot at a swim meet without annoying officials with a flash (I'll get to test that out next week). Today, I'll take it into our school gym and take pictures that I won't have to edit for exposure. This is exciting for me. I bought it used at Peace Camera in Raleigh, which made it significantly less expensive than buying it new from Nikon. I'll post more after I've had time to play with it. So far, I've only used it for pictures of my cat.
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| I may have to do some weight lifting to strengthen my hands and wrist because glass weighs a lot! |
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