I referred to this briefly on the “about me” page however a little more detail on the equipment I use seems appropriate.
Hardware
I did have a 35mm film slr with a couple of fairly high magnification lenses some years ago. At the time I did quite a lot of birdwatching so trying to photograph them seemed like a good idea. However the time taken to get a film developed meant any opportunity for improving a picture was long gone and the enthusiasm waned.
The first digital camera was an Olympus mju 400 which I got in 2004 I think. It produced pretty good results and I have a set of photos from a holiday in Ireland in 2005 which still look good now. I tend not to be impulsive but I saw an Olympus mju mini and fell for it! Not the best camera in the world but it was so small it did mean I carried it with me far more that I would have done something larger which was a good habit to get into.
The Panasonic FX-01 from 2007 was a great step for me. Genuinely compact so I did carry it with me and producing some very good images without any editing required. It is still is use now as it fits easily into a pocket. Particularly useful for lousy weather as it is easy to keep dry and gigs where it is unobtrusive.
Early in 2009 I decided to spend more time on photography and to get a dslr and I bought a Sony alpha 350 which has lasted me well and given me the opportunity to learn more about what I feel I want now. Ultimately I used three lenses with this body and the images up to around April 2011 on here will have been taken with this camera. I had a Tamron 18-200 lens as well as a Sigma 50mm f2.8 DG Macro lens for close up work. I also used a Tamron 10-24mm f3.5-4.5 Di II which was extremely wide angle.
A 2010 update – the Panasonic met with an accident early in January to my sorrow. It has now been replaced with another Panasonic “point & shoot”, a TZ-65 (basically a TZ-6) as a backup camera. The choice was quite simple really – the Lumix range uses Leica lenses with a wide angle capability and a good optical zoom.
In 2011 I’d known for a year that I would need to replace the Sony however my thoughts on what to get have varied. For quite some time I intended to get a Nikon D700 which is an outstanding camera however it is a full frame “pro” camera which is a little heavy for what I want. I read a magazine review recently on the Nikon D7000 and it immediately struck me as a option. Reading others reviews around seem to confirm the thought. While it is not full frame it has many other features that you might expect to find in a pro camera but is lighter and the lenses are maybe a little cheaper. I bought a couple of lenses to go with it straight away – a Nikon 18-200 zoom lens and a fast 35mm (f/1.8) prime lens. Having got used to the new camera (to some degree at least) I decided to look for an ultra wide angle lens as I find myself seeking wider and wider scenes quite often. They are not the easiest of lenses to use but sometimes the results pay off. I’ve now got a Tokina 11-16mm (f/2.8) lens which looks promising so far.
This is not a particularly cheap collection of gear but the prime lens is outstanding so far and the camera itself is excellent with many features lacking from the Sony. In particular it will shoot acceptable images at very low light levels with iso speeds of 4000/5000 still giving reasonable images. The RAW images from this camera are – to me – far superior to those generated by my Sony and I find myself using RAW most of the time now.
While the Sony will remain a “spare” for now I’ve only kept the Tamron lens for general use and traded in the others for my new camera.
Software
Over the years I have made use of a number of pieces of software for image editing going back to earlier versions of PaintShop Pro and including various free programs I came across.
I have used Serif PhotoPlus x2 and x3 and Elements 6 (it came with the photo course) a while back. To me they all have their failings and certainly are not very intuitive. I decided to explore some other options and installed a trial version of Adobe Lightroom. 24 hours later I was hooked and almost all my editing is done in Lightroom. My preference is to show the scene as it is and so I do as little editing to my images as possible. I also have Photoshop cs4 but it is not often used at present. The downside of the new Nikon mentioned above was that I needed to upgrade Lightroom to V3 to allow me to work in RAW with the Nikon files. Some of the new features are good/useful but I don’t think it would have been worth the money without the need to be able to edit the Nikon NEF files.
I take quite a lot of panoramas and have tried one or two programs for stitching images. The best so far is Hugin. It allows a lot of user input but equally does the job automatically most of the time. Microsoft’s own utility (MSCIE) is good for a quick look and the latest version runs faster than Hugin however Hugin allows a far better range of options and tweaks.
Image utilities and other software
There are plenty out there however these are some that I currently use and find helpful.
Exif Pilot lite is very useful if you want to look at all/any exif data for all the files in a directory. It has an “explorer” like interface, is easy to use and does a good job. Some what redundant if using Lightroom but a useful utility anyway.
I have taken quite a few images of buildings and had some difficulty getting the perspectives absolutely correct. Artistic approaches aside it is one area of photography where it is important to get it right. After a bout of frustration with one image I was pointed to ShiftN by someone and I have found it very useful indeed. Part of the toolbox I guess.
Finally – for now – I shoot RAW images mostly. There is a slight penalty in burst mode which isn’t too bad on the Nikon and the ability to recover details from images if necessary makes up for the size penalty. Equally working with images in grayscale from RAW gives more picture information available before moving to jpeg. While I have tried of software Adobe support has improved with the latest release and the integration with Lightroom makes it easy to use that method.