For every photographer, the act of capturing photos is a creative journey – or, so I’ve read. I’ve also read that it’s useful to keep a blog about your journey into photography.
My first experience with a camera was in the mid-90s, with a 35mm fixed-zoom film camera. The first SLR I ever used was my dad’s old Zenit EM, with a Helios 44-M 2/58 lens – however, I never used it to its full potential (as an SLR), and have only ever pressed the shutter button.
Around my 15th birthday, in July 2006, my parents bought me a digital camera – the Canon Powershot A610 – because they were fed up with buying new rolls of film. Apparently, with only 24 exposures per film, I was snapping through them very quickly – “so here’s a digital camera, and here’s an SD card which can store 1000s of images.”
Since 2010, I’ve used a combination of phone cameras, with very little usage of my A610. My phone at the time was a Nokia X2-00, a candy bar style feature phone with a 5mp camera. Pretty good quality, too. I bought a HTC Wildfire shortly afterwards, but haven’t used it a lot since – unfortunately, it became a victim of my experimenting with Android and Flash ROMs. It still works, with CyanogenMod 10 Buzz, but it’s not as great as it was with default Android 2.3.
The device that really revolutionised my camera in pocket game was my iPod Touch 4G. I could never get on with iTunes, or the lack of customisation of iOS, or indeed the fact that a tiny drop often resulted in huge screen cracks and body dents – 3 main reasons why I no longer have it.
But my first smart-‘phone’ was a Nokia Lumia 820 on the Windows Phone 8 OS. It too had a great camera, with touted Carl Zeiss lenses. Again, it still works, and I still occasionally use it, but at the time (Jan 2015) the lack of apps support drove me away to Android. Also, with the recent demise of Windows Phone/Mobile, I fear I may no longer use it at all.
My camera experience then transferred over to the HTC Desire EYE, a mid-range phone with flagship specs. I’ve still got it, and it serves a purpose as my ‘secondary device.’ Almost the same 13MP camera that sits on the rear, also sits atop the front of the phone on the top bezel (the reason the phone was given the name ‘EYE’), the only difference being the apertures – f/2.2 on the rear, vs f/2.4 on the front. The only thing that brought it down as a camera was the response time – it took too long to take a photo.
So onto my most recent experience – a new smartphone as of December 2016, a Samsung Galaxy S7. It’s been great for snapping quick photos, but as with any smartphone camera, photos lack quality and you can’t zoom in on them.
As a photographer, I yearned the return to dedicated cameras, so I started to use my old A610 again last summer. It still worked, until the metal plates in the battery compartment played up. One day, I inserted new batteries, only for it to show ‘Change the batteries’ on the screen. Since a repair of an 11 year old camera was probably going to cost more than the cost of buying a new one, I wanted to take the next step in photography – a DSLR.
After a 6-month search, from initial browsing of the market in June 2017 to making a final decision in November 2017, I settled on a DSLR.
Chris JK photo blog 