hello from marstonfoto

I think I came rather late to digital cameras. When clearing out a cupboard last week I found the first one I had. It is an Olympus Camedia C-2000, a plastic-bodied 2.1 megapixel camera from ten years ago and it is a good candidate for my camera collection. With a 3 x zoom (35-105 mm equivalent) f2.8 lens and an optical viewfinder as well as a small LCD it has an auto mode plus aperture-priority and shutter-priority modes. The storage medium is Smart Media and I found a few 8 Mb cards. It looks a bit battered but works perfectly and will produce nice 7 x 5 prints. I remember that I replaced it with a Minolta XT (3.1 megapixels and a nice slim body) but I gave that to my grandson otherwise that would also be in my collection. It was when Canon produced the 300D that I started to move to digital and the 300D was replaced with a 20D which was replaced by a 5D and I now have a 5D Mk II with some fine lenses for serious work.

But before the 300D came along I was already toying with the idea of a digital camera capable of making large quality prints. My local friendly independent photographic dealer sold me on the idea of a Minolta Dimage 7 Hi. It must have been about 7 years ago. This “bridge” camera with a fixed 28-200 mm Minolta lens with a 5 megapixel sensor cost the best part of £1,000 and my business dutifully parted with the cash. I took it to Prague in December 2002 (together with the little Olympus) and it was more than a disappointment. It was a disaster. I had read the manual, taken a lot of test shots and was going to give it a real workout. I think it must have been the most user-unfriendly gadget ever made. Because the LCD was so tiny and the typeface miniscule most of the settings were achieved by pressing buttons that had a rotary selector switch. You had to move the rotary selector to the parameter to change and hold the button down while using a wheel by the shutter button to change the parameters. There were three of these selectors in strange places on the left of the camera. The  electronic viewfinder was dim and despite having a diopter adjustment was not sharp. In nearly every case the camera’s metering system was beaten by the Prague light. It came closer to being right with the spot meter. Focus was hitty-missy but again the spot variety was the best option. It’s cold in Prague in December and batteries don’t  function too well but they lasted hardly long enough to get more than a couple of dozen (poor) shots. The Olympus was a star by comparison. So after another try over Christmas with slightly more success the 7 Hi went to live in a cupboard alongside an old Polaroid and one of the first-generation digital video cameras. Three years later I lent it to my stepson to take on a trip to Antarctica (he’s a travel agent and has a wonderful photographic eye) and it beat him too. Now it is sitting on my collection’s shelves as an example of a poor effort.

To put a digital camera into a collection (by default or by buying it specially) it ought to have a special quality (which both of the foregoing have and for very different reasons!). I don’t count the Canon DSLRs although I think the original 5D would have qualified had I not sold it to buy the Mk II. The next possibility was a Panasonic FZ-50 that had everything going for it except for much too much noise at high ISO levels but I also sold that for a good price after using it for 18 months.

The first deliberately purchased digital SLR for my collection was an Olympus E-330. This is a FourThirds camera introduced in 2006 and the first DSLR ever to offer Live View. The E-330 has a distinctive design. Instead of the standard prism, that creates the “hump” it has a finder light path that runs sideways which gives it an elegant shape. The very clear and bright LCD is articulated in the vertical plane which allows for low and high shots as well as providing a really good “waist-level finder” that is as good for candid shots as it is for portraiture. The 7.5 megapixel sensor produces good prints with the trademark “Olympus colour” and the two “kit” lenses are good. The implementation of Live View was excellent since it permitted the phase-detection auto-focus of the earlier Olympus DSLRs while also providing the contrast-detection auto-focus that is a feature of compact cameras. The E-330 shows Olympus in full creative mode.

Almost simultaneously I had the opportunity of acquiring a FujiFilm S2 Pro from a wedding photographer who was upgrading to a Nikon D3. The S2 is built from a Nikon D80 body using the wonderful Fuji 6/12 megapixel sensor and was introduced in 2002 at which time it was something of a revolutionary concept. This particular camera has a battery grip and the camera thus can run off a total of 8 lithium AA cells, certainly enough for a whole day’s wedding shooting. The S2 is not an amateur’s camera. It is deliberately aimed at the professional who needs to get high-quality shots with excellent pictorial quality and in particular the best skin-tones in the business from a fairly simple camera over a lengthy period using Nikon lenses. As such it deserves a place in any collection, particularly as its successor the S3 did not bring any startling improvement. The S5 Pro (there was no S4) is quite a different camera being based on the Nikon D200 and represents a standard of pictorial quality that in my opinion has yet to  be bettered by any digital camera. My own S5, currently used as a back-up camera to the Canon 5D II, will no doubt join its predecessor on the collection shelves in a few years time.

In 2007 I bought a Pentax K100D Super. This is a 6 megapixel entry-level DSLR that runs off 4 AA cells, has a sensor with a sensitivity range of 200-3200 ISO, in-body shake-reduction system and a dust-removal system in a metal body. No Live View, just a camera designed for taking pictures in the traditional manner. You could think of it as a modern-day Spotmatic or K1000. Pentaxes are unique amongst digital SLRs in that they support every lens that any Pentax camera could use right back to the first one in 1957. The screw lenses need an adapter, cheaply available. Manual lenses with the “auto” aperture setting will meter in aperture-priority mode but the magic of this camera is that even the oldest lenses will meter in manual mode; you set the aperture and press the AEL button and the camera sets the shutter speed. And for all lenses, even manual-focus ones, the camera will beep when the lens is focused. So you can see that the reason it is in my collection is that it can use so many of the collected lenses.

When I began this blog I did a piece on compact cameras, four of them which I still own but I think that fairly soon two of them will join the others above in my collection. I think the case for one of them to be there is pretty strong. The Fujifilm F31 fd is a really good low light point and shoot. The sensor was overtaken in the market by the rush for more and more megapixels (but you really don’t need more than 6 for a p&s) so it was the last of its kind. The other one is the Canon Powershot A590 IS which I think will be the last of its kind as well.