My photography hobby

Hello everyone!

In this post I want to talk to you about my photography hobby, and give some background on how it all started :).

If you want to buy a new camera, because your old one is no longer working or just out of date, feel free to check out https://www.photos-videos.net/, where you can order your new camera easily online.

I must have been 9 or 10, and it was the late 70’s, early 80’s at that time, when I started to take my first steps into photography. I remember my dad having a Nikon camera (at least I believe it was a Nikon) and me trying it out, with some shitty photographs, because this was really old school, so with a film in it. Yes I am that old, so there were no digital cameras and I had no clue about how a camera really worked. I just thought you could aim it at something and then get an amazing image. Boy was I wrong.

After that we got a Polaroid camera, so you got instant results, which was better in this case, because it was just point and shoot. So I really started to enjoy taking photographs. Still not very good though!

During my teenage years, I was too busy just being a teenager, so I didn’t do much with photography during that time. After I was done with school, I was in my early 20’s at that time, I got myself a new Hanimex 35 DL camera (which I still own to this day).

The Hanimex was a real fun camera to have and use with its dual lens (that’s what the DL stands for), so you could easily switch from a wide 34mm lens to a 44mm tele lens, by just rotating the lens. It has a fixed focus, and fixed shutter speed of 1/125 seconds. 2 Dual AA batteries power the camera, with an inbuilt flash.

Check out an in depth review of the camera at http://austerityphoto.co.uk. I used the camera mainly for holiday pictures, and at the ship building company I used to work at during that time (which closed down sadly).

In 2001, I got my first ever digital camera, so I could really take loads more pictures without having to buy dozens of film rolls all the time. I decided to buy the FujiFilm FinePix 4700zoom, because I really liked the design of the camera, and of course the whopping 4.3 megapixels image sizes (2400 x 1800)!

The FinePix was a real joy to play around with and it felt good in my hands. With a zoom range from 36mm wide, to 108mm tele it was an excellent camera for a hobbyist, which I still am to this day. The aperture range is from F2,5-F7.0 for wide shots, and F4.5-F10.5 for tele shots.

The max shutterspeed for the camera is 1/2000 seconds, so pretty fast for great still shots of flying birds or planes (or Superman). 2 AA batteries power the camera, and the images are stored on a SmartMedia card (16MB included).

The FinePix has an optical viewfinder and a small 2 ” (130,000 pixels) LCD screen to look back at your pictures. This was really bad imho, because every image you take looks great on such a small screen, but when you uploaded the images to your computer, it was kinda frustrating to see several of the images were just blurry.

Check out a lengthy review of the FujiFilm FinePix 4700zoom at https://www.dpreview.com.

After I had dropped my camera during a holiday, and broke it (something internally is broke), I was looking out for a new camera to continue with my hobby. Canon had launched a new DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) one year earlier, and since I had never owned a SLR camera, I thought I needed to try that out now.

So in 2006 I got my first DSLR from Canon, the 350D, with just the standard 18-55mm kit lens. It is a lot heavier than the FinePix I had used before, so that took some getting used to, but the strap to hang it around your neck helped out in that regard (more on that later).

I never got any extra lenses for the camera, and only used it in Automatic mode, because I was kinda scared to use the manual settings tbh. I still had no clue what I was doing (some might say I still don’t), so Automatic mode was the way to go for me.

The Canon EOS (Electro-Optical System) 350D has a 8 megapixel CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) sensor so you could shoot images up to 3456 x 2304 pixels, which was huge at that time (in my opinion anyway).

Because the Canon EOS 350D has a cropped sensor (3:2 aspect ratio), the range from the standard kit lens was from around 29mm (18) wide, to 88mm (55) tele. So not really usable for real tele shots. The aperture for the kit lens, ranges from 3.5 to 5.6 which is not ideal for bokeh shots (unless you get real close and personal).

The shutter speed ranges from 30 seconds to 1/4000 second, so ideal for long exposed images with the slow shutter speed, or freezing time with the fast shutter speed.

Check out a full review of the camera at http://cameradecision.com/.

I must have taken around 3000 images with the Canon EOS 350D untill 2011, when I went to Singapore for a month, for my work at that time. I had a lot of free time in the evening and weekends, so I decided to bring my Canon. But due to the heat and very high humidity, it was not fun to carry the camera around my neck all the time, so I went to a local mall and got myself a small handy point and shoot camera.

The Samsung PL200 became my final choice, because of the high pixel count (14,4 megapixel), it small size and weight, dual image stabilization, and the optical zoom of 7x.

Because this was just an in between camera, I wont go into all the specifics, so if you want to know more about the Samsung PL200, feel free to check out the review at https://www.cnet.com/.

In 2014, I really got the photography bug again, but the point and shoot was not the way I wanted to stay at, so I got myself a Canon EOS 100D, which came out in 2013, with a 18-55mm kit lens and a 55-250mm tele lens from Canon.

Because I still had bad memories from the neck strap from the 350D, I decided to buy a shoulder strap, which was the best decision ever! I could just hang it around my shoulder so it hangs on my side, so easy to reach to take a photograph. I highly recommend this to people who hate having to carry their camera around their neck all day.

The 100D has a 18 megapixel APS-C CMOS sensor (cropped), which amounts to a max image size of 5184 x 3456 pixels.

The viewfinder is optical with a 0.87× magnification, and it has a fixed LCD touch screen on the back measuring 3″, which is also used for Live View.

The Canon EOS 100D also has a video function where you can shoot videos up to 1920 x 1080 pixels at 30, 25, and 24 fps. So ideal for HD video for a blog, or vlog for instance.

Read an in depth review of the Canon EOS 100D Rebel SL1 at http://www.trustedreviews.com/.

I finally started to move from automatic mode to aperture priority, or shutter speed priority (still not going for complete manual mode), so i am really slowly making progress ;).

Because I love to take photographs in cities, parks or just the woods, i noticed that having 2 lenses (18-55 and 55-250), was not very handy, because it meant I had to switch lenses regularly. So I started to look for an affordable lens which combines these 2. I ended up with a Tamron 18-270 lens, which is ideal for just taking your camera to a city and have a good tele and wide lens all in one.

The Tamron 18-270 has an aperture ranging from 3.5 for wide shots to 6.3 for tele shots. It also has vibration control, so this works perfect for if you want to take a quick shot at long range for example. Just be sure to turn that off if you mount the camera with lens on a tripod.

You can lock the lens in its in position, which I really use a lot, because I wear the camera around my shoulder, so the lens usually points downwards and due to gravity the lens just extends on its own.

Read a review of the Tamron lens at https://www.dpreview.com/.

In a later post I will talk more about the things I like to photograph, so feel free to check out this blog at later dates.

I would also love to hear from you, and how you became interested in photography, so feel free to leave a reply at the bottom at the comment section.

I hope you enjoyed this post, and if you did, feel free to share it on your favorite social media.

Kind regards,

J