Everybody needs a hobby

So it turns out that I haven't had a lot of time to pursue any real hobbies in the last five years or so. Funny that. So I figure that there are worse hobbies to have than photography. I saved up my last three paychecks as a grad student, and spent them on a new camera.

For the last ten years, I've been operating on two different cameras. First, a Nikon F60 (N60 in the states), and a Canon Powershot S60. My favorite of the two cameras being, by far, the former. That said, I tend to take a lot more pictures with my little Powershot.

The bottom line is that the writing's been on the wall for a long time: 35 mm film is slowly disappearing, and I admit that I've been in denial about it, largely because of my aforementioned love of my Nikon F60. For me, the real clincher was when I found out that Nikon had no plans to design another film camera after the F6. Point-and-shoot 35 mm cameras are all but extinct (seriously, try to find an amateur-level P&S film camera these days). The only film formats likely to survive the great Digital Revolution are the medium-format and large-format films, and even they will probably disappear eventually. Hasselblad now makes a full-frame medium-format CCD sensor.... The cheapest camera it's attached to costs $15,000.... so pretty much my current annual income. I didn't buy that.

So I got myself a digital SLR. I didn't go too crazy. I didn't buy myself a EOS-1Ds Nor did I dish out for a Nikon D3. Ultimately, I opted against both of those cameras for what I considered to be two very good reasons: 1) I'm not a professional and 2) I don't have $9,000. No, I went for the camera that professionals use as their back-up camera. The one that they use when their real camera breaks down, or doesn't have the right lens attached, or doesn't have its battery charged, or whatever (although, I once knew a sports photographer who went to every event armed with three identical EOS 1Ds SLR bodies, each mounted with a different lens; for those of you doing the math, that's almost $30,000, not counting the lenses mounted to them; and the one of the three lenses he was using that I could identify at the time was worth $10,000 on its own; he rationalized it by saying that he didn't want to waste time changing lenses). I wanted something I could play with, not something that'll empty my bank account. Although, in hindsight, it did end up emptying my bank account, but only by virtue of the fact that my bank account is practically empty to begin with.

So the first few shots I took in a word, sucked. But I'm starting to get the hang of taking pictures with this thing. You have to think about a lot more, because you don't necessarily have a computer doing the thinking for you. You have to think in terms of depth of field, and white balance, and F-stops and shutter speeds. You have to think about ISOs and how they affect your images. You have to think about metering and when to use a flash. You have to decide when you want to opt for a regular lens or a telephoto.

Yeah, fun stuff.

Expect photos to be posted here in the near future.