On safari...

Well, after reaching those conclusions about my Minolta lens I took it away with me to a day at West Midlands Safari park and got some surprisingly good results. I'm now a little unsure what to make of this lens, I still think the images from my Sony lens are better but the added zoom definitely helps in certain circumstances. I think if I was lucky enough to go on a real safari to Africa I would need a large zoom high quality lens with me and perhaps would spend a bit of money on hiring something to take with me rather than trying to buy.

African Rhino

Reindeer

White Tiger

Giraffe

More purchases and a little about F-stops!

Around this time I made a number of new equipment purchases for my photography:

Hama shutter release cable

I bought a Hama release cable - this was basically to make up for the fact that the NEX-3 (unlike the NEX-5) doesn't have infra red remote trigger, and so long exposure shots where we required no movement at all, are affected by a button press. Attaching this simple but effective device seems to get around this and reduces (though to be honest still doesn't fully eradicate) trigger wobble. 

LowePro Fastpack 250

Another investment, and one I love to bits, is the LowePro Fastpack 250 rucksack - this is designed to hold your camera and a number of different lenses and other equipment in the lower 2/3rds of the backpack with side entry panel for easy access to your camera. There is also a top section to hold other items and a laptop section, erm, to hold your laptop. I have to say this bag is perfect, it holds all of my photography equipment and when I travel I simply remove the items I don't need, add my laptop, and take this as my hand luggage. I love it!

Minolta AF75-300 telephoto lens

The final purchase I made was a new lens (well, I say "new", it was new to me, I bought from ebay for a price I could justify for this experiment). This was the Minolta AF 75-300 telephoto zoom lens. You may ask why? Simple, because I was trying to take pictures of birds in the back garden and decided that my Sony SAL-55200 lens couldn't get close enough and I must therefore need a lens with more zoom. This lens was 75-300 instead of 55-200 so of course had greater zoom and was therefore better right?


Well, my basic theory was of course correct, the lens turned up and I was delighted to see that yes I could indeed zoom in a little closer on the subject.
However, it turns out I was wrong, it took me a while to realise it and lots of bird shots, and then I finally sumarised that this lens was not as good as the Sony SAL-55200. Yes it zoomed in further, but the pictures were never quite as good. I decided I needed further investigation!

Birdwatching through the Sony lens

Birdwatching through the Minolta lens

At first I concluded it was down to the lens' F-stop ratings. The Sony lens has F4-5.6 and the Minolta has F4.5-5.6. I thought to myself, the 2 numbers must represent the best and worst F-stops the lens is capable of and therefore the Sony lens is capable of F4 rather than the Minolta which is only capable of F4.5. Everybody knows that the lower the number, the "faster" the lens, and so it is capable of letting in more light, this must be the reason the pictures didn't look as good through the Minolta.


Nope, wrong again, I finally did some more investigation and found out that the F-stop ratings represent the best possible F-stop rating at the 2 ends of the zoom scale. So the Sony SAL-55200 (F4-5.6) is capable of an F-stop of F4 at 55mm and F5.6 at 200mm. The Minolta 75-300 (F4.5-5.6) was capable of an F-stop of F4.5 at 75mm and F5.6 at 300mm. So at their furthest zoom reach, both cameras managed and F5.6 and therefore for this situation were both the same. Yes at the un-zoomed end of the scale the Sony lens was faster but I was trying to capture birds whilst totally zoomed in so this was irrelevant.


Much more investigation down the line and what I concluded (with no real proof or evidence) is that the Sony lens was simply better quality. It would seem that a better quality lens costs more money because of the quality of the glass (materials and shape), the number of elements, good multicoating of all the elements, quality mounting, quality manufacture and assembly. You cannot base the quality of a lens on the statistics attached to it and whilst F-stop ratings and other such things are indicative of a lens' potential, the potential is only as good as the quality of the lens! Many months further down the line I realised this and now have pretty much stopped using the Minolta lens in favour of the Sony. 


This of course didn't solve my problem, Sony do make a 75-300 lens for the same price as my 55-200 but that is a little more expense than I'm prepared to play with and they also of course have similar lenses for a lot more (silly) money which I'm not going to stretch to. Instead, the simple and obvious solution, is to move myself closer to the birds. I could invest as little as £60 in a bird hide and just sit and wait for the pictures or alternatively I have realised that the longer I spend sat in my garden the more tame the birds become and I can simply sit closer to them! :)

Birdwatching through the Sony lens close up!

Trip to the lakes

During a weekend away at the lake district I took my camera with me and managed to get a few snaps during a walk around lake Buttermere. I took quite a few shots but in all I tried to give a bit of thought to the composition. One things which seems to be important and to work well with landscape photography is to have multiple levels - i.e. include a fore & middle ground, not just a background. I tried to include this in the following pictures:

Foreground: Beach, Middle: lower hills, Back: higher hills

Foreground: Beach, Middle: Fence, Back: Hills

Foreground: Flower, Middle: Lake & trees, Back: Hills

Honeymoon pics and new lens!

The honeymoon came around which I had bought this camera for and I started snapping away the usual holiday photographs, then I decided to try and put some of the general rules into practise that I had gradually learnt about such as the rule of threes. We were on the island of Athuruga in the Maldives which was a beautiful place so needless to say the results were some very pleasing photographs - the majority taken hand held and still using the auto focus.

The water villas

The jetty

Sunset drinks

Cooler

Sunset

The island

Whilst on our honeymoon it was my birthday and my amazing wife bought me a camera related gift in the form of the Sony EA1 Lens mount adaptor which allows you to fit any A-mount DSLR lens to the E-mount NEX cameras. Of course I didn't own any A-mount lenses so she also bought me a Sony SAL-55200-2 A-mount telephoto zoom lens (DT 55-200mm F4-5.6 SAM lens) 

Sony SAL-55200-2 lens

Sony EA1 lens mount adaptor

The autofocus on this lens still works with the adaptor but it is slow and it was at this point I started to use manual focus on my shots which I was quite pleased with as it pushed me into something I was otherwise avoiding out of laziness. I will write more about my findings with this lens later but suffice to say it is a great and very capable lens with great results.

Blind tidy

Oakley reflections

A big Joby!

I had previously owned a Joby Gorrilapod for my compact camera and soon realised that I needed something a bit stronger to cope with the additional weight of my NEX-3, especially with the bigger lenses attached so I invested in the Joby Gorrilapod SLR-Zoom model which is much more chunky and does the job perfectly.

Taken from http://joby.com

I am still using this new Gorillapod over a year down the line and it is a top quality product! 


Around this time I also invested in a proper tripod - well, I say "proper" but in reality it was a very cheap model from Ebay. It did the job at the time but I soon learnt that it wasn't anywhere near stable or sturdy enough and eventually I would need to invest in something better.

Starting to play a little

Over the next couple of weeks I experimented with the camera, trying new shots, I soon realised a few things which differed from my use of compact cameras:


1) The capabilities of taking low light photographs was massively better than any of my previous compacts - night photography was pretty much a waste of time with these but the NEX is more than capable of capturing some great shots.

Rubbish on the pavement

Lack of 'toys' meant I use a TV remote and a phone for these lights!

2) The auto focus works an absolute treat to the point I still hadn't really messed about with manual focus very much (though I knew this was something that would come in the future).


3) The lens' Optical SteadyShot image stabilisation technology was incredible, I took numerous close up shots of flowers, plants etc. without a tripod and got great results.

Egg shell

Ladybird

4) The flash, like with my compact cameras, was pretty much useless. Now it may be that I simply haven't got the skills to use it properly but pictures taken using the flash always look washed out and unflattering.


I also started to realise there were a couple of negative points about the NEX-3 compared to other cameras and even to the NEX-5 (I'm sure there are plenty more but these were the first I identified):


1) The camera doesn't have a standard flash shoe, instead it uses Sony's own interface which means that I can only use accessories officially released by Sony (and to be fair they have released a few such as a stereo microphone etc.) which means I couldn't use any other flash systems or things such as off camera flash.


2) The lack of a digital remote trigger is a bit of a pain, when it comes to long exposure pictures as pressing the shutter release by hand causes vibration through the camera. You can get around this by using the time delay but if you wish to use the cameras bulb mode for a very long exposure it would mean holding it by hand.

My first decent camera - Sony NEX-3

I made the decision that it was time to invest in a DSLR because I had my honeymoon coming up which was in the picturesque setting of the Maldives and I was determined to get some good photos so a few months before the wedding/honeymoon I finally made my decision and opted for the relatively new Sony NEX range of cameras rather than a fully fledged DSLR. I have often questioned this choice since then and am still not sure whether or not I made the correct decision.


I opted for the NEX-3, mainly because of the price and because the differences between that and the NEX5 were very few and of minor importance from what I could tell. The main differences that were immediately apparent to me that I could see were that the NEX-3 only shot 720P HD video instead of 1080P and also that the NEX-3 didn't have the built in infra red remote trigger which the NEX-5 did. However these 2 differences didn't seem to make up for the large price differential between the two cameras (and the NEX-3 was on offer at the time as well - walking over the road from the Sony store to the Jessops store saved me nearly £200!)


The camera came with the Sony 18-55mm lens and I immediately set about taking random pictures of things in the hope that something astounding would appear - at first I was a little disappointed with the results, and then I took stock of the situation and remembered that this wasn't some all-powerful fantastic picture producing machine, it was still just a camera and I had to make it work for me. So I set up a picture of a flower and was really happy with the results (below) - this was simply a hand held picture, I hadn't at this stage got as far as buying a tripod!

I was also immediately pleased with the aperture settings - producing pictures with the foreground & background blurred and the centre image in focus, this was the first time I had experienced depth of focus and the results are always pleasing.

Underwater photography

I never really took many movies with my compacts, the quality just wasn't good enough and far inferior to the quality of the pictures so I opted for pictures over movies every time. 

One thing I did adventure with was taking pictures under water - I did this using an aquapac waterproof camera bag which worked a treat. Without a view finder on my camera it was very much point and click and hope with these pictures but I had some fun results all the same. 

Free diving

Reef Sharks

I would love to invest in a proper underwater case for my new camera but to be honest I just can't afford the official cases and wouldn't trust a cheap ebay version with my camera so I will continue to play with this method for now!

I also used the same compact camera and aquapac camera bag to shoot some short movies:

In the beginning...

I've always been a keen photographer, I guess it's something I inherrited from my Dad who has always owned multiple cameras and has a collosal amount of pictures and slides, projector equipment etc. and took the step into DSLR's some time ago. Also my Grandad was always a very keen photographer and his slide shows became legendary - often being asked to put on special slide shows and talks particularly on local history and the local areas.


As a young boy I took great delight in using my Dad's cine camera though back in those days the cost of film was not cheap so it was something I never repeated unfortunately (thought: I must investigate whether my Dad still has his camera and all the other equipment). When video cameras came along and I managed to borrow one for a while I took great delight in putting together a short film with my brother and cousin - "Ninja Warrior" I believe was the title... :)


As far back as I remember I always owned a compact camera - again the cost of film & development meant that I couldn't just snap away all of the time but whenever we went away on holidays I usually had a new film in the camera and took holiday snaps.


As a teenager I lost interest (as teenagers do) and have a period of several years of my life where I have no pictures to look back at, then came the first of the digital cameras and life changed forever!


They obviously weren't cheap, and the photo's they produced weren't the best quality, and it wasn't easy at first to get pictures produced from the digital images, but here was something that you could just use over and over without having to pay for film and get it developed. I think my first usage of digital cameras in anger was when I started getting into modified cars and I would take pictures of my handywork and eventually started creating websites with these pictures. I wrote how-to guides on the things I did and edited the pictures to include crude arrows etc.


At this stage, I was still using the pictures as functional things, if you wanted to take a picture just to look at the outstanding beauty of something or intrigue and marvel over the way something looks you still needed to remortgage your house to be able to afford the necessary equipment.


However, as I upgraded my cameras, the quality started to improve, and finally I started looking at the art side of photography rather than the functional side and that's when you really start to push your camera and start trying to understand how things work and what makes a better picture.


Here are a small selection I took using my Hitachi HDC-751E:

The lights of NYC

Sunset in the Maldives

Deckchairs

Approach to Venice

Catching the sun in Koh Larn, Thailand

A quiet Venetian street

Then along came DSLR's, the next step, and the difference in quality of the pictures was obvious to me. My Dad invested and the pictures he was producing were far and away better than anything I could hope for with a compact. But the price tag was still a little high for me so I held off, sticking with my compact cameras.


Eventually, after some of my friends invested in DSLR's and I saw the pictures they were taking, I started to realise this was something I really had to invest in. Pictures of a holiday destination that both me and a friend had visited were so different in quality and really my pictures failed to capture the essence of the place as well as his did.


On top of that my friends attended a photography course which taught them a lot about equipment, settings and different approaches to photography (I guess my years of taking photo's helped my eye for composure because when they explained the rule of thirds to me we realised a lot of my pictures already stuck to this rule despite having never heard of it)