My Camera History and Credentials (the boring precursor)

I’ve always loved to take pictures at my own convenience. Light and easy to use were what I looked for in a camera. I started off in film. A nameless brand of point and click was my trusty companion on every holiday up until 2000 (when it broke). I was great, one button to turn on the flash, one button to wind back the film at the end and one button to take the shot. I have scanned in some of my early photos from this camera at these galleries:

The first digital camera I took underwater was my Fuji Finepix F810 which I bought in 2004 and have been using for above and below water until this April when I drowned it. Most of my galleries are with this camera.

etc

In my grief I bought a few others to play with Fuji E900 and Ikelight housing (which will now be my backup underwater but I haven’t used much yet), Cannon G7 (which I couldn’t really get on with) and Olympus sp550 (which I love but wouldn’t be so good underwater due to the massive zoom).

Pics from the oly:

Above water I used auto and below I used manual settings (due to the external flash I kept over exposing the pictures until I switched to manual). With such a simple set-up why on earth would I want to switch to something as heavy, bulky and complicated as an SLR? Well I asked myself the same question. The answer is better growth potential. I spend most of my free money on my holidays and I felt that underwater with my compacts I was running out of the potential to take significantly better pictures. Cue the D300, Nikon because the general consensus was its easier to house a Nikon and it had the lure of live view… what better way to easy myself into an SLR than using the screen like I do on my compacts. Well it didn’t quite work out that way but I’ve bought it now, I’ll just have to learn.

Tags: Nikon, D300, Compact Camera, Underwater, scuba diving