My Equipment - Cameras

I thought it might be a good idea to tell you which equipment I am using.

As I have mentioned to you before I started out with the Nikon F75, 35mm, SLR.  I have done my photography for beginners course with this camera and found the picture quality to be really good.  In fact I think it is much better than many (of the older) digital cameras' picture quality.  It is an elegant looking, light-weight camera made mostly out of plastic.  It has 5 auto focus sensors and multi-sensor matrix balance fill flash.  You can set it either to fully automatic or use the 6 manual exposure modes.  I found it very user-friendly and really enjoyed shooting with this camera.

I was asked to take photos at a wedding in 2006 and became VERY NERVOUS indeed to use the film camera, simply because you do not see what the pictures look like when you take them.  So I bought the Nikon D50, 6.1 megapixel camera for the occasion!  According to Wikipedia the Nikon D50 is the lightest Nikon DSLR to have the autofocus motor (Reference:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_D50).  The weight of the camera is important to me because I really struggle to keep the camera still if it is too heavy.  Although I love this camera and find it user friendly and it taking good quality pictures, I do find the noisy shutter very annoying especially if you try to take a photo inside a church, etc. during a sermon or wedding.  What I do like is that it is not too heavy, although I still cannot leave the shutter open for too long before my hands would start shaking and the pictures come out blurred.  The longest I can get away with to leave it open is ± 1/60 second otherwise I need to use my tripod.

During our stay in the UK, we went into one of the shops that sells photographic equipment and I found a mono/tripod combo that was displayed in the window.  I was very impressed as the price had been marked down significantly so bought it immediately.  It is handy of course to have the monopod included for those situations where you cannot really reach the spot where you would ideally like to take the picture from.  I also bought a remote which works very well with the D50.  It came with it's own little pouch and is probably the size of a person's thumb.