I'm really getting a lot out of my camera
I've had my dSLR for a couple weeks now. I haven't played with it as much as I'd have liked recently, but I've been a good little nerd and read the manual and tried tweaking the settings. I also got a few nice pics of my last "serious" camera.
It's a FED 3, a Russian made rangefinder camera that is more or less a copy of a Leica. I bought it during university off eBay, since I wanted to try a bit of more creative photography. I shot a few rolls of film, but drifted away from it after a few months. It was really too difficult, and some choices and budget constraints didn't help.
For one, it's a fairly heavy, fully manual camera. Manual aperture and focus, and a dial to adjust the shutter speed. Critically, no built in metering, and I didn't own a light meter at the time.
Due to the above inability to gauge exposure, I was really just guessing at the settings. In an attempt to get decent pics, I would bracket shots, and also try logging (into a notebook I carried around) my settings. This quickly became too much work, at least relative to studying. It didn't help that most places would tweak pictures to try and make them look good, so that I basically couldn't tell which picture was over/under exposed, and couldn't exactly replay the lighting conditions from a week ago to "learn" what to expose.
In contrast, taking pictures with my new camera, a modest Canon XS, is a revelation. For one, the ergonomics are great relative to anything I've used before. Most importantly, it offers the sort of feedback I craved, both with the rangefinder above and all the various point and shoot cameras I've owned over the years.
There's a lot more I could go on about, but I'm quite surprised:
-how easy it is to manually focus with the focus assist
-the luxury of items such as shutter and aperture priority
-being able to change ISO speed on the fly
-seeing the results, right away, of what you're doing
It's not all rosy, so maybe in a few weeks I'll put up a post on what I find lacking in the camera, but as it stands, I am thrilled to be taking pictures and learning a bit about the world by looking at it through a different view. I feel like I might just have a shot at getting to the point where I won't be the limiting factor in the pictures I take.
Cheers, V.
It's a FED 3, a Russian made rangefinder camera that is more or less a copy of a Leica. I bought it during university off eBay, since I wanted to try a bit of more creative photography. I shot a few rolls of film, but drifted away from it after a few months. It was really too difficult, and some choices and budget constraints didn't help.
For one, it's a fairly heavy, fully manual camera. Manual aperture and focus, and a dial to adjust the shutter speed. Critically, no built in metering, and I didn't own a light meter at the time.
Due to the above inability to gauge exposure, I was really just guessing at the settings. In an attempt to get decent pics, I would bracket shots, and also try logging (into a notebook I carried around) my settings. This quickly became too much work, at least relative to studying. It didn't help that most places would tweak pictures to try and make them look good, so that I basically couldn't tell which picture was over/under exposed, and couldn't exactly replay the lighting conditions from a week ago to "learn" what to expose.
In contrast, taking pictures with my new camera, a modest Canon XS, is a revelation. For one, the ergonomics are great relative to anything I've used before. Most importantly, it offers the sort of feedback I craved, both with the rangefinder above and all the various point and shoot cameras I've owned over the years.
There's a lot more I could go on about, but I'm quite surprised:
-how easy it is to manually focus with the focus assist
-the luxury of items such as shutter and aperture priority
-being able to change ISO speed on the fly
-seeing the results, right away, of what you're doing
It's not all rosy, so maybe in a few weeks I'll put up a post on what I find lacking in the camera, but as it stands, I am thrilled to be taking pictures and learning a bit about the world by looking at it through a different view. I feel like I might just have a shot at getting to the point where I won't be the limiting factor in the pictures I take.
Cheers, V.