Today marks ten years since I brought my K100Dsuper home from San Jose
Camera. A few months previously I had upgraded my Lumix FZ20 to an
FZ50, which was in many ways a brilliant piece of kit. The zoom and
focus rings on the barrel acted just like they would on a "real camera",
the UI was overall wonderful to use, the lens was awesome, and in good
light the image quality was great. However, in lower light, the small
size of the sensor showed its weaknesses, so when the FZ50 was lost when
my girlfriend's car was stolen (we got the car back but not the stuff in
it), I decided to look at low end DSLRs.
My theory was that I'd just buy an inexpensive camera, maybe not even
buy much in the way of lenses for it, because I figured that in a few
years camera bodies with the performance I wanted would become affordable.
My first forays to Best Buy and the ilk made it obvious that I really
disliked the low end Canon. The kit lens was so bad that feel of
zooming and focusing practically made my lens crawl. Someone with a
website, who seemed to know what he was talking about (I won't mention
who but his last name rhymes with Rockwell) waxed eloquent about the
Nikon D40.
I wandered into San Jose Camera, planning on buying a D40, and the
salesman was talking about the advantages of Canon over Nikon. I was
mulling this over because I really did not like the Canon when I
overheard him discussing the Pentax with another customer. It turns out
that using my legacy Nikon glass on the D40 was not trivial, the Pentax
had the same sensor as the D40, built in image stabilization, a nicer
kit lens, and cost less.
Long story shortened, I brought the K100 home, went from shooting maybe
a couple hundred frames a month to wandering about with the camera any
time I had a few minutes to kill and averaging about 100 a day. That
weekend I realized that the kit lens on the K100 simply didn't work for
low light dance photography and I ordered an FA31 the following week.
I suppose I could put together a collection that is a serious ten year
retrospective, but I'm feeling lazy, so here's a set that goes almost
that far back:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157682830861601/
And for more of the earlier, here's a book I put together just about
seven years ago of my first three years since I got back into photography
http://www.blurb.com/b/1790067-three-years
I had spent some time hanging out in other fora, mostly the DP Pentax
forum before I met John Francis and he pointed me at the PDML, so y'all
can blame him. The PDML struck me as one of the few places where people
who actually knew how to use their cameras outnumbered those that
didn't. In most of the other fora, folks who had been using a DSLR for
about six months and had recently learned how to use fast glass and
misuse the word bokeh were the experts that gave everyone else advice.
I found that looking at other people's photos, and particularly reading
the critiques of them helped my own photography tremendously. Also when
taking a photo that wasn't in a style I normally shot thinking about how
someone in particular from PDML who did a lot of that sort of
photography was a great place for me to start when figuring out how to
take it.
In some ways it's kind of a silly anniversary to mark, but I do want to
credit and thank y'all for the help in whatever artistic (if not social)
growth I've managed to achieve in the past decade.
--
Larry Colen [email protected] (postbox on min4est) http://red4est.com/lrc
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