Photography

My first digital camera

My first real camera was an Olympus OM/10 which I used for many years, initially with Kodachrome 64 slide film then with some generic colour film. At that time I enjoyed taking photographs but did not really take it seriously nor did I really understand what I was doing.

Shortly after arriving in Japan I bought my first digital camera. This was also an Olympus, a C-820L 0.81 Megapixel camera (shown in the photo) which used 2Mbyte SmartMedia memory cards. At the time it seemed amazing, but with no zoom and a ridiculously short battery life it was geek toy not a serious camera.  When my children were born we got a Canon Kiss SLR for family photographs. As with the OM/10, I still did not take photography too seriously.  Film was still relatively expensive and the turnaround time for processing meant it was a long time before I could see the results by which time I would have forgotten the conditions under which the shot was taken.  Once digital cameras had improved I went back to a digital point-and-shoot. The attraction of seeing the pictures immediately was too strong.  The Canon SLR then sat in a drawer.

While shopping for a new point and shoot to replace my wife’s broken one I realized that the price of D-SLRs had dropped to the same as a good point-and-shoot and less than I had paid for the Olympus C-820L 10 years earlier.  Also, if I got a Canon I could use the 90-300mm lens that had come with the film SLR. So I bought a Canon Kiss X2 (450D).

Having bought the DSLR, I thought that I better learn how to use it. This was just before a trip back to England for a summer holiday, so I bought a book on using the 450D (it was easier to read than the Japanese manual that had come with the camera) and downloaded some photography podcasts that I listened to on the plane.  Several trips to bookshops in England yielded more books on digital photography; it seemed that I am now hooked.