I am a camera
Posted on Monday 30th November 2009
Well, not really, although we do now own a new one. Credit to The Buggles for the title here. Their pleasant synth-pop song can be viewed here.
For years now we have been using a Sony Cybershot. When new, it was among the better compacts available and we were attracted by good reviews. In typical Japanese product style, it has worked faithfully ever since, although more recently being let down by the poor lifespan of the rechargeable batteries.
On it’s own that wouldn’t have been enough reason for a new acquisition, but we are planning a couple of trips away next year, including another prodigal visit to the UK. So I wanted to be able to take a camera that would really do our memories justice. Compact cameras are very convenient and take excellent close-up shots, but they fall down on larger scale landscape and panorama shots. Conversely, a SLR is designed to capture everything with far more detail, better colour reproduction and superior clarity.
Which then presented the dilemma of which to buy. The principle of “You get what you pay for” certainly applies, so I didn’t want to wind up with an inferior model. But equally, aim too high and you wind up with an overly complicated machine with a manual thicker than War and Peace.
So I chose the Canon EOS 7D. This has a nice balance of being quite advanced, and of high quality, but still supporting anything between fully automatic and fully manual modes. Hopefully I will learn to operate this camera with experience and research, and slowly graduate from letting it do all the work to creating all the settings myself.
Despite having this new toy, we will not be ditching the reliable Cybershot, but it will now be relegated to more risky work like being my diving, cycling and retrievals camera. Hopefully it will see out a good few more years, but it’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t.
It’ll get it’s first proper outing on Christmas Day and I’ll post some pictures, both compressed and original size (all 7 megabytes of them). In the meantime, a photo from the outside:
