I’ve spent the last couple of years wishing more and more that I had access to a camera – but here’s the problem. I wasn’t interested in shooting film.
I know that will have "real photographers" punching
themselves in the face in indignant rage, but the whole process of loading the film,
calculating the exposure (lightmeters?? wtf) and making the prints seemed mind numbingly laborious – and after all that, you have no real idea what you’ve got until days later. Not for me.
I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop for my work
for years – digital was the way to go for me!
But the digital cameras that my family had
owned were really coming up short. You got the instant results, but the quality
was almost always terrible even though some of them had over 10 mega-pixels. I
wanted to be able to sell my images on the stock sites I contribute to, so
compact point and shoot cameras were out.
So, I gravitated towards a digital SLR.
After reading all the magazines (and there’s soooo many) and getting some good
advice from a colleague, I narrowed the contenders down to Canon and Nikon. It
was a 50/50 choice and while I was weighing things up – Nikon released the
D3200 and it swung the deal.
If you want a thorough review here – look
online or buy a mag – there are experts who can give you a thorough unbiased report
based on years of expert testing. My perspective is from the “learner driver”
end of the spectrum.
All the reports I read before and since
buying, are pretty much on the money – this is a great camera. And Nikon’s
advertising backs this up – anyone can pick it up and get great images as soon
as the battery is charged. The price is attractive given the mega-pixel count
that the APS-C sensor can capture and the controls are intuitive and easy to get
the hang of. I bought the camera with the Nikkor 18-55mm kit lens, ordered some
spin on filters and a cheap tripod on ebay and I was good to go!
I set out on the Saturday morning after
getting my hands on it and staggered back home 5 hours later thinking I was
Ansel Adams.
Unfortunately, not only were my feet
blistered – my shots were really – for want of a better expression – mehh!
They were really only run of the mill snaps and when I looked at them on screen,
I realized I had nothing. A thought wormed it’s way into my mind that maybe
it’s harder to take good images than I had rashly assumed. Just as everyone
wrongly clings to the belief that we’ve all got a book inside us – maybe we
can’t all be photographers! (same as we can’t all date supermodels, go to work on jetpacks or bring about
world peace). Maybe I should aim lower – depressing!
Luckily – I pushed through and things have
improved, although there’s plenty of distance to go – I’m enjoying the process. Learning to use a sophisticated camera well is only going to take time, and practice makes perfect.
The one major piece of reviewer advice that I think is key with this or any
DSLR purchase – the kit lens is fine, but that’s about all. There are some real
performance drawbacks with the glass (listen to me using photo-boy terms) and
they really impact on the performance of the camera back. The 18-55mm kit lens has huge
problems with colour fringing (look out for a specific post coming soon), and
tends to make the images “noisy”. I was getting really down-heartened, worrying that it was due to the camera performing badly, but it is down to the lens choice.
I’ve just bought a 50mm prime as my second
lens purchase and I’ll be able to compare the 2, but if I was buying today, I’d
be tempted to go with the camera back on it’s own and buying a 35 or 50mm
prime. The price is roughly the same but the quality of the glass is way
better. Hindsight is 50/50.
So, to sum up…
1. Digital photograph good
2. Camera great
3. Skills poor
4. Lens, a bit wafty! Not terrible, and great for practicing, but certainly not capable of what I'm trying to achieve.
It can only go upward from here!
Please leave me some feedback if you're enjoying these posts - I welcome your messages and hope you'll keep following the posts!
No comments:
Post a Comment