As promised, I’ve been beavering away on the photos we took during our recent trip to the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Many deletions, rotations and captions later, the albums are finally available for your viewing pleasure.
The completion of this task now leaves me free to crack open and play with our new Canon EOS 400D SLR camera. The kit lens has been supplanted by an EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM lens, which will be our lens of choice for the vast majority of our shooting. Like our faithful old Minolta A2, it features an image stabiliser, which is great for us, as we almost never carry a tripod.
Our initial results with the camera today in the Vondelpark were pleasing, but we’ll sorely miss the ability to voice-caption our photos. That feature really is unmissable for the itinerant traveller and I’m not sure how we’ll cope without it.
This is our first SLR and we’re now eager to delve deeper into the science and art of photography, so that we can obtain the results we know a camera like this is capable of. I’m always disappointed by our holiday photos, as almost all of them fail to capture the glory of the moment. Good photographers can achieve the opposite effect, namely that the photo makes the moment in question look better than it actually was.
Anyway, I’m pleased to have the latest holiday photos on-line and must say that I’m missing the region considerably since having returned. On the plus side, the last couple of days have seen glorious spring sunshine warming the city and encouraging us to make for the zoo and the Vondelpark, where lots of other people had obviously had the same idea.
That’s a yummie lens, good choice; it will make a massive diffenence from the kit “lens”. (they call it a lens, I call it a paperweight)
The only downside is that with this one you wont have a true wide angle, but I guess you didn’t have that on your Minolta either.
If you ever want to take some nice portraits of your girls, pick up the dirt cheap 50/1.8 lens. No zoom, so it is very sharp and its wide maximum aperture will render any background nice and out of focus, the merrits of which you will certainly learn about when you start reading up or even doing some courses.
If you like that lens, you can upgrade to something like the 85/1.8 later, that is a top portrait lens, one of my favourite Canon lenses.
Enjoy your new toy, you know how much I enjoy photography myself!
I had (and still have) a so-called wide-angle converter for the Minolta. It’s an extension lens that you attach to the front of the A2’s built-in lens (since that one can’t be removed).
It actually produces nice wide-angle pictures; the main hassle with it (apart from having to attach and detach it) is that it required one to access a particular menu setting each time to tell the camera that the converter was now attached. Otherwise, the necessary optical compensation won’t be performed by the camera.
Thanks for the 50/1.8 lens tip. You’re not the first person to suggest that as a good wide-angle lens, so having two tips from people I trust is enough to tip me over the edge and make me get it; especially if it’s cheap, as the 400D has already cost me enough money. Purchasing the 24-105mm lens took our 400D up towards 5D territory, so I’m keen to master what I have already before I incur more expense.
Which camera do you own, by the way? I forget what you have. Is it a Canon or a Nikon? I seem to recall it being one of the two.
I am an odd ball, I shoot an Olympus E-1, which I bought for various reasons three years ago, but mostly because Canon nor Nikon had no good optimized lenses for the smaller sensor size at the time. Plus the build quality of the body and lenses are superb, unless you go for a EOS-1D or Nikon D1/D2, you won’t find anything as solid. It makes it extremely pleasant to hold.
I still really like the camera, the only downside really is the high-ISO noise. Up to 400 it is fine, but at 800 it really only looks good as grainy black and white. (like the photos of you and Wiesje, they were at 800) But seeing as how I only shot ISO 100 slide film in the decade before going digital, it is not something that could ever bother me!
Still, I now wish they did finally come up with the promised prime (non-zoom) lenses, of which they don’t have enough.
There should also finally be a new pro model later this year, to which I might upgrade to in 2008. For now, 5 megapixels is plenty for me, I get superb 16×12″ prints from it.
Another real up-and-commer in the arena is the Pentax K10D, a whole lot of camera for its price tag and they too are comming up with some very well-matched lenses for it plus some fantastic quality “pancake” (ie: really flat) prime lenses.