Me and my camera

I've always enjoyed taking pictures, ever since I was given a Box Brownie and a roll of 120 film to play with on holiday in Wales one year. A couple of years later I got my hands on a Kodak Instamatic and colour film, which I think came in a cassette. I'd be about 12 and I took it on holiday to my Aunt and Uncles in Dorset. 

I set about taking photographs rather than just holiday pictures as I told my sister, and talked about framing the shot and looking for light and shade. I don't think I really had a clue what I was talking about, but some of the resultant pictures turned out okay as I recall. 

The cost of a good camera was way out of reach, so it wasn't until I got to University that I had the money to buy my first 35mm camera, a Zorki 4K range-finder. I quickly learnt to use a light meter and make adjustments for the idiosyncrasies of the camera. The shutter speeds never quite matched the numbers, but then again every camera is different.

My next move was to a 35mm SLR with a built-in light meter. This time it was a Practica with a 50mm thread mount for the lenses if I'm remembering correctly. I had several prime lenses and a telephoto. What I do remember was the weight of the thing. But it performed really well and I had many years service from it until it was stolen in a burglary. 

I replaced it with a Miranda. The name had just been bought by Dixons and the cameras were manufactured under licence somewhere. This was semi-automatic, with a full manual mode. The single point metering meant that you could choose your light source so-to-speak and the manual focus was simple and straightforward. I used this camera for a long time until I just drifted out of taking photographs for a while.

Then, one half-term, I took Ally out with the camera and let her try her hand. She really enjoyed it so we bought a pair of Minolotas. A Dynax 4 for Ally and a 5 for me. With a shared long lens we had a lot of fun exploring photography together.

Eventually we bought a Nikon D50 to try digital and this became Ally's camera more than mine although we always saw it as a shared camera. Wanting to make use of my nice Sigma 105mm macro lens I always dreamed of getting the Minolta Dynax 5D until the stopped making them when Minolta withdrew form camera manufacturing a few years ago.

So that brings me to the present day and my recent purchase of a Sony Alpha 300. The 300 is a special edition version of the 350. Same camera but with a 10 mega-pixel sensor rather than a 14.2 mega-pixel sensor. Given that pixel count is not the be all and end all of digital photography and the 10MP version has some better reviews, I took the plunge and bought the camera.

The Barcelona trip was my first opportunity to give it whirl and whirl away I did. 205 times in fact. That's a lot of pictures and would have involved at least 6 rolls of film. The nice thing of course about digital is that you can check your picture there and then and don't need to take two or three extra ones just in case you missed something the first time around.

The Alpha has all the usual features as far as I can tell of a typical DSLR, but with a few interesting quirks. It has a button on the top to tun the live view screen on and off, I don't remember that on the D50, but I haven't used it that much. But the most novel feature is the fold out screen function. The, quite large, LCD screen has a hinged bracket and it can be folded out to give you a horizontal screen. This means you can hold the camera at waist height and view the image on the screen. Very neat. The camera also has built in camera shake correction and a nifty tele-converter, although this only works in live view.

Overall, my first impressions is that this is a very nice camera and I look forward to discovering more of its abilities.