Digital cameras I use for my photos

A few people have been asking what I use to take my photos so here is a short history

2002

I used film cameras (Pentax and Nikon) until early 2002 where I got my first digital camera, a (roughly) 3 megapixels Sony DSC-F505V.
Even though the quality of the pictures could not hold up with a scanned 35mm slide it was good enough for the internet (see the photo on the right) and what blew me was the immediacy of it all. Instant gratification! Going out and taking photos, downloading them to my computer et voila! No more waiting for a film to be finished, bringing it to the shop in Chania and getting the results sometimes weeks after the photos were taken.
Another important point was that once you had spent the necessary money on the hardware (and some of that stuff was expensive in 2002! 128Mb Memory Stick at Euro 90!) you had no more costs so could take as many pictures as you wanted.

From that point on my annual number of photos jumped up to around 10.000.

The F505V had a good lens (Zeiss made) and plenty of settings available but no viewfinder. You had to look into a not terribly bright lcd screen which showed you very little if you were outdoors in the bright Cretan sun. I also found that most pictures were having a fairly strong red tinge (you can correct it in post-processing of course). And the 3 megapixels were, well...only 3 megapixels.

2003 - 2004

So in autumn 2003 I got the bigger brother the Sony DSC-F707 (it had just been supplanted by the Sony DSC-F717 so the camera was going cheap). At 5 megapixels there was a big improvement in resolution as well as a faster lens (still using a 5 x optical zoom). Another very big improvement was the presence of a viewfinder. I didn't have to guess at what I was pointing at in bright sun anymore, I could SEE though the viewfinder.
The camera also had a metal body (I really don't like plastic cameras), spot metering and a flurry of other things that I liked about it.

I also sometimes used a wide-angle converter (the main lens is the equivalent of a 38-190 mm which is not exactly very wide). The VCL-MHG07A was a good (heavy) piece of glass that worked well but was a little clunky to use (difficult to thread and you had to alter the camera settings to get it to focus).

I spent about 15 months using the F707 as my main camera but in the meantime more and more digital cameras were appearing on the market making it look a little dated. My main issues with the DSC-F707 were that it was fairly noisy (not as in 'acoustic noise' but 'image noise') - at least by 2004 standards - and the colours were a little oversaturated, especially the green.
Sony had unveiled their latest, the F828 with (the then huge) 8 megapixels and RAW image format but it had too many issues of noise and purple fringing. So I waited for an F828s or whatever the next improvement would be. And waited and waited...
Eventually as Sony looked like they had all but pulled out of the advanced amateur market in order to concentrate on smaller, lighter, cheaper cameras the Nikon Coolpix 8800 came out....

2005

Moving over to Nikon meant "loosing" a lot of what I had invested in Sony: Memory Sticks memory, batteries, wide-angle converter but otherwise the CP8800 was the camera I had been waiting for for over a year. The quality of the lens was superb, truly superb and the fact that it gave you a 10X optical zoom was great. Noise levels were MUCH lower than on the Sony. The lens also a VR vibration reduction that worked very well. The camera body was nicely compact and felt very solid. What else...good battery life, RAW image format, 8 megapixels, spot metering and CF cards that were much cheaper than Sony's Memory sticks.

Of course I had some gripes as well: very slow write to the CF cards especially if you are shooting in RAW. The lens is a little slow at telephoto length and the zoom would have been nicer if it had been mechanical.
To this I have to add Nikon's piss poor ability to come up with accessories (I tried for 6 months to order the wide-angle attachment until I gave up) that are in their catalogue. But I managed to get a battery pack in order to use AA rechargeable batteries. This comes in handy when I am away from power sources for many days (or weeks) at a time, for example in the Himalayas.

At the time of writing this (July 2006) and 18 months after it first appeared on the market it is still one of the best non-SLR cameras available. No mean feat in a very fast moving market.

I was also starting to seriously consider buying a digital DSLR . It offered far more speed and much more flexibility in upgrading (you buy lenses instead of new bodies). A big negative factor was the additional weight (I carry a camera on my walks and they are often long and demanding walks) and of course much higher cost. Still, the Canon EOS 20D looked very attractive until Nikon brought out the D200. This was a bit of a bombshell: a professional camera for the price of a high end amateur DSLR. This happened right after I sold one of my photos for the front cover of a book (to Penguin books) and whilst this paid me only a fraction of the price of a Nikon D200 there was something symbolic about it and I knew that I had to have a Nikon D200....NOW!

2006

In retrospect I am really glad that I decided to buy the camera so early on (in late December 2005) because I managed to get hold of one the first batches of cameras (as well as spare batteries and battery pack) to come to Greece (late January) before the success of this camera created worldwide delays. Half a year later and people are still trying to get hold of D200 bodies, spare batteries have all but disappeared and the battery pack is out of stock. And here I must thank Giorgos Skoulas from Sigma Laboratories in Chania for getting hold of it for me at an excellent price. This makes a nice change when most high end products in Greece are so much more expensive than anywhere else in Europe.

Of course, now that I had the body and the power supply it was time to splash out on glass. A great all-rounder had just appeared on the market. The 18-200 mm Nikon lens (it's called the Nikon 18-200mm f3.5-5.6G DX AF-S VR) become my main lens. Because digital Nikons are not full frame cameras there is multiplying factor of 1.5 so an 18-200mm lens become a 27-300mm lens. It's great at the telephoto end but becomes a problem if you want to use a very wide angle lens. This meant I also had to splash out on a Sigma 10-20mm lens (which becomes a de facto 15-30mm).
And because I like to take photos of flowers I also bought the excellent Tamron 90mm macro lens (wich becomes a 135mm lens).

This all had to fit in a much bigger Lowe Pro bag. Add to this larger and faster memory (Sandisk Extreme 2and 4 Gb), an 80GB Hyperdrive memory cards backup device and a huge stack of top quality rechargeable NhMH AA batteries (as well as two chargers) and I am ready to go off to the Himalayas for a few weeks...and a few thousand Euro poorer.

Was it worth it? Emphatically yes! It is a completely different beast. A much more demanding camera and the 10 megapixels make it very unforgiving when you view your photos at full size on a monitor. But the results, when you get them right are superb. I still have a lot to learn though. My current D200 manual is 732 pages long.

I must add that I am also still using the Coolpix 8800 because that camera is much much lighter so it is a good one to take when I am going to carry a lot of weight (for example on long walks to waterless areas).

2007

I bought a Gitzo 1258 carbon fibre tripod with a Markins M10 ball head and Kirk camera brackets. It wasn't cheap but it's light and stable. Also got myself a Think Tank belt and lense changers which make life easy when I am walking about.

I also added a Nikon SB 800 flash which I don't use often enough but it still comes in very handy for indoor photography.

Towards the end of the summer and in time for my autumn trip to Nepal I finally cracked and bought the expensive Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8D ED-IF lens. It's supposed to be one of the best zoom lenses ever made by Nikon and the cost reflects it. But the quality and the sharpness is superb so no regrets there.

2008...

Nikon brought out two excellent new cameras, the D3 and the D300 but if I get anything this year it will be glass, not a new body. A new body might be on the horizon in 2009 if Nikon comes up with a high resolution full frame camera and my income from photography justfies the cost that such a camera would have

Post-processing hardware and software

As I mentioned at the begining of this article, the beauty of digital photograpy is being able to bypass the lab. But of course you will not get any decent results if you just click away and do not do any post-processing.
You should in effect be doing the job of the lab. What your camera is recording is more or less what you would have been getting on a slide (or a negative) but it also needs to be "printed", that is made visible for screen viewing or printing with your own printer (I'll get to that later). So you will need to adjust contrast, brightness, colour balance. You might want to crop your pictures, resize them, sharpen them etc...

I use Photohop CS3 for all my post-processing needs and now that I have discovered the incredible possibilites that photographing in RAW format offer I have added Bibble Pro as my Raw workflow tool of choice.

I still use ACDSee as my viewing and files sorting software of choice, probably because it seems to be a little faster and more flexible than Adobe's own Adobe Bridge.

Once you start to deal with 15+Mb RAW files you need to have a pretty fast computer. I run a Pentium dual core machine with 2Gb of RAM and it is adequate for now.

Most important is being able to see what you are doing and I am very happy to use Dell's wonderful Widescreen UltraSharp 2405FPW, together with a second 22" CRT and a Matrox Parhelia graphic card. I calibrate them with Colorvision's Spyder 2 Suite.

Printing

I have an Epson R1800 photo printer. Very good but expensive on inks.