photography

Bought an excellent book to read whilst on holiday – The Digital SLR Handbook by Michael Freeman.

I have a number of photo books by Michael Freeman that I used extensively when I was working in, and teaching photography. He writes really informative books on photography so when I decided I wanted something about digital photography he was the only choice for me.

Now for lots of good reasons I do not have a digital SLR but use a Canon Powershot S2 IS – an excellent bridge camera, quick to use, flexible, creative and light to carry when walking. Many things in the book were not applicable but it covered the things I want to get to grips with really well. Top of the list was histograms and exposure – and I have been working on that and have seen an improvement in the exposures. I also want to start to use Photoshop on my images and he has some good things to say about that.

The final thing I got from the book (so far as I have not read it all yet) is that my next camera is likely to be a Canon G9 so I can shoot in RAW. So out goes the idea of a Nikon P60 as a lightweight walking camera (lost interest in that when I found out it does not have live view of the exposure) and in comes the G3 – the only thing holding me back on that is that it uses battery packs not AA cells. Well I am not going to buy it tomorrow so by Christmas there may be something else on the market that does what I want in a compact digital format,

• Compact size
• Viewfinder (absolutely essential)
• SD cards
• AA cell power
• Short zoom 5x optical at least
• RAW and jpeg (now)
• Image stabilisation
• Live view
• Manual exposure
• Some useful modes – snow and foliage are two I use on my S2 all the time
• Hot shoe (well it is a low priority)

Well it is “my” wish list.