Photography has been an interest of mine for quite some time, though until fairly recently I have not been that seriously into it. I bought my first digital camera ( the Largan LMini 350 Digital Camera
) back in 2001, and it had a barely adequate 640x480 resolution. A few years later V. took pity on me and bought my first Sony DSCP9 Cyber-shot
digital camera, and that had 4 megapixels. I took lots of pics when we traveled and some of them were even decent. Continuing our love affair with Sony, she bought me another camera, the 7.2MP Sony Cybershot DSC-P200
. For her birthday this year I bought her, you guessed it, another Sony camera, this one is a pink Sony Cybershot DSC-T700
. Even though the T700 is a fantastic 10 MP camera that's super compact, I just can't take it seriously because it's pink (though it does come in other colors such as Grey
), so I continued to carry and use the P200. The nice thing about the P200, is it has a larger than average sensor compared to the ultra compact point-and-shoot cameras out there, including the T700. So even though it loses in the megapixel wars, I tend to think the image quality on it is slightly better than V's new camera.
But no little P&S camera can hold a candle to the superior sensor of an SLR camera. The much larger sensor means far better image quality and low-light sensitivity. The downside of course is the much-larger camera body and significantly more expensive hardware. I tried to hold out for a while, learning as much as I could while sticking with the P200. Some basic stuff about composition, shutter and exposure settings, aperture, etc. And so I think I started taking better pictures. Well some of them are still stinkers but maybe more of them turn out ok now.
So how do you know when it's time to move on to a digital SLR camera? For me it's the need or desire for better equipment to do the same job. Will my photos look that much better? Probably not in a huge way--sure, in some low light situations it will be easier to get non-blurry shots with a SLR. But I think more of it has to do with being able to quickly and accurately control the settings and take the shot you want instead of fiddling around with a clunkier device. So I've decided to make the move to a dSLR. More on that soon... but this might be a surprise, it's not a Sony.
While I wait for my new camera to arrive, I thought I would go back and take a look at the shots I took with all these P&S cameras -- somehow some of them actually turned out decent. So I'll share with you what I think are the "greatest hits" of my pre-SLR photography. Enjoy this best of the mediocre collection, and maybe some day this post will be followed by a part 2, from my SLR era.
http://s78.photobucket.com/albums/j118/pmok_mr2/?start=all&mediafilter=all&action=tags¤t=best
for some of the really old Lmini shots: http://s78.photobucket.com/albums/j118/pmok_mr2/photography/lmini/?albumview=grid
