Guess what happened today: I finally got off my behind, took my own advice and purchased my very own Nikon D50!
It wasn't an easy choice to make, seeing as the Fuji FinePix F30 also had a great deal to commend it - not least of all a compactness which makes taking candid street photos so much easier - while Canon's decision to slash the price of the EOS 350D upon announcing the EOS 400D meant that a mere £50 separated the two cameras in price. Ultimately, though, I decided against the FinePix F30 for the time being due to its lack of full manual controls, as the purpose of this acquisition was to learn the fundamentals of taking pictures; what worked against the EOS 350D was a combination of ergonomics (the D50 controls are more cleanly and logically laid out, while its LCD is bigger and brighter), build (the D50 felt more ruggedly constructed), lens quality (the EOS 350D's kit lens has been assesed as being inferior in quality to that included with the D50) and, yes, price (the features in which the Canon 350D bests the Nikon D50 simply aren't worth £50 to me). I don't want to make it sound like it was an open-and-shut case, however: these two DSLRs are both so good that I don't think I'd be feeling any real buyer's remorse even if the decision had gone the way of the Canon, while I feel fairly certain that there's a FinePix F30 purchase sometime in my near future - it'll make a nice, discrete backup camera once I feel sure enough of my technical skills with the DSLR.
By the way, speaking of photographic skills, there's nothing quite like getting a really good camera to mercilessly expose your shortcomings on that front: I shot more than 240 photos today, more than I've done in the last two years combined, and of that number less than 40 were halfway presentable (and I'm not even talking about artistic merit here, just technical skill). I've culled the least humiliating of that smaller number and uploaded them to Flickr: go here if you want a cheap laugh or two at my expense (I won't mind, I know I can't yet take photos worth a damn).
" I shot more than 240 photos today, more than I've done in the last two years combined, and of that number less than 40 were halfway presentable (and I'm not even talking about artistic merit here, just technical skill)."
But I think that's what's great about digital photography - the marginal cost of one extra picture is approximately zero. My view is: keep taking plenty of pictures and it doesn't matter what the proportion of dross to presentable is - there'll still be plenty of good pictures. I suspect that it's not all that different for professional photographers. One of the Times' weekend supplements has a regular feature about iconic images, describing the shoot and showing the contact sheet. You'd be surprised how crap a lot of the non-circled photos tend to be.
Posted by: Frank McGahon | August 27, 2006 at 12:47 AM
"But I think that's what's great about digital photography - the marginal cost of one extra picture is approximately zero."
You are 110% correct. According to this page
http://medfmt.8k.com/bronlensenvy.html
the average film SLR owner used to shoot 10 rolls of film in an entire year; on the assumption that each 35mm roll contains 36 exposures, today I managed to shoot more than that entire quantity in the space of 3 hours. Hopefully that profligacy will show results in terms of my shot-taking skills - I actually learned how to use the manual focus today (useful when the autofocus can't settle on the right target), so there's grounds for optimism on that point.
Posted by: Abiola | August 27, 2006 at 06:43 PM