How I got into the Digital end of photography.

I guess this is as good of a time as any to do an explanation of how I got into the digital end of photography.

As long as I can remember, my dad always took pictures and at a very young age (about 6 or 7), he started teaching me how to take pictures. Of course, back in the dark ages, photography was done on VERY manual.... and in our case, VERY German cameras! My parents grew up and lived during the time of the Japanese invasion and occupation of China before and during WWII, so that should help explain their attitudes. Anyway, the camera was a leaf-shuttered Voigtlander Bessamatic. It was a "coupled, match-needle" camera with exactly one lens. A 50mm/f2.8. So I learn photography from the standpoint of having to understand light, aperture, shutter speed, film sensitivity and how it worked together. Therefore, it's not surprising that I not only use "manual" setting regularly, but have knee-jerk negative reactions to anything that's purely automated.

So, for a very long time, I carried traditional film cameras and manual focus lenses. It wasn't always like that and since I've always been a "gadgeteer": when I started buying my own equipment (with my brother's help and a part time job), I bought a Canon A-1 which as arguably the most electronically advanced camera of it's time. This camera was along with Abernathy High School's Canon AE-1 was used mostly for annual staff photography. This means the VAST majority of my photography was spontaneous photo-journalism. Understanding all this as my photographic background should explain a lot about how I see photography and camera equipment. Of course I lusted after Nikons (who didn't?) since that what "professionals" used, but absolutely couldn't imagine affording it. My best friend Eric's mom had a Nikon F with several lenses and our instructor, Milton Adams at Photography camp (how geeky can you get!) being a professional newspaper photographer used the "Holy Grail" F2s.....with Motor Drives! My brother ended up with the A-1 and I ended up making a HUGE mistake in photographic equipment, but that's another story for another time.

In the first 10 years after college when I had a real job and no family, I began building my camera system again. At this time, I was living and working in Lubbock and their was this little second-hand camera shop out on the Levelland Highway. It was run by a Sheriff's Office dispatcher and his friend who was a part-time camera repair guy. One day I went in and came across a Pentax MX with 50mm/f1.4 lens in "mint" condition. More importantly, it was much more affordable (teacher, remember?) to me than a Nikon FM (which was what I REALLY wanted) when you take into account the cost of real Nikon glass. ....and really, is there a point to buying Nikon and not putting on Nikon glass!?! A fact that is not well know is that most of the mainstream Japanese manufacturers of the late 60's, 70's and early 80's had excellent glass! They were all pretty close to the "big boys", Nikon, Canon & Minolta. Even the companies that generally specialized in the consumer end of the market such as Asahi Pentax, Olympus, Konica, Mamiya, Yashica even the lesser known such as Miranda, and Topcon. Of course the Germans were good at glass, but their camera's were over priced, and really, even the Eastern Bloc glass was very good as well, it's just that their cameras were way behind the times. In that industry, everybody copied everybody else and really in that age of pre-computer design, the Germans had already done it all and everybody else just copied it. So, my decision making due to feature set and price, came down to Olympus and Pentax. Both made excellent camera with "near-professional" features and quality, and above all else, had good glass that was cheap (because it wasn't Nikon). So over a period of about 10 years, I accumulated 2 Pentax bodies (1 Black MX and 1 Black ME Super), something like 10 Pentax SMC-M lenses, motordrives, flashes, etc.

I happily went on like this for a number of years. Around 2000, I added a digital camera; a 3.1 Megapixel, Kodak 4800. It was a very nice starter camera and I took lots off pictures. However, this camera didn't fit the bill for a "do everything" SLR replacement. And by the a few year later, I realized that the only pictures I ever did anything with was the digital ones and my great Pentax rig that took me a decade to accumulate was collecting dust. About 3 years ago, around the birth of our second child, I decided to "bite the bullet" and go completely digital. Meaning that I'd have to sell ALL the film camera equipment to fund a digital camera that would do everything I wanted. As a result of carrying around 2 bodies and 10 lenses for so many years, I decided to go "whole hog" the other direction.

At this point, I made a HUGE mistake: I bought on features and specification. I decided that I'd force myself to be less "camera-centric", by purchasing a "Super-Zoom" type of digital camera (mistake #1), that was compact, thus meaning it had a lens which had only electronic controls (mistake #2) that had the most Megapixels on the market for they type (mistake #3).The theory was good, buy something that had every concievable feature built in so I wouldn't be buying stuff, changing lenses, adding attachment etc. Great idea right? Just not even a good idea for ME and the my approach to photography and how I expect my equipment to operate.

I bought a Nikon Coolpix 8800VR. An 8 Megapixel camera with a 35-350mm (35mm equivalent) Vibration Reduction (awesome feature- I highly recommend it) lens built in, with the ability to save RAW files as well as JPEG, Nikon's newest iTTL flash exposure control, really cool swing-out view screen that has the ability to twist in virtually all directions, all built into a magnesium-alloy chassis! What's not to like....right? Little did I realize that "Super-zooms" use "consumer" camera sized sensors (read small) and 8 Megepixels make the situation much worse since that many photo-sites are crammed into the little dinky sensor just creates more noise problems when you use a ISO speed higher than 200. To exacerbate things, it turned out to be a verrrry sloooooow operating camera. I didn't research enough (imagine that), and didn't realize that this class of camera have a very small or no memory buffer at all, so every time you take a picture and the camera is writing the HUGE file to the memory card, your camera is locked-up! On top of which, since ALL lens controls were electronic in the body, it is much slower than being able to handle your own lens.

For somebody who cut their teeth on photo-journalism, it just was not a good situation. Don't get me wrong, it's a very nice camera with excellent optics and resolution; however, it was the wrong camera for ME. So it was one of those divorce type things: "It's not you...it's me".

Next time, I'll get into how I resolved this rather big photographic problem.