The development of my gear, part 1

In the last post I told a little bit about the story of how I became a photographer. In a couple of next posts I will write a bit about a gear I'm using and in what order I got it. I will include also a few comments on how I see the value of my choices now and concider if I would do something differently. I will also put in some shots that I have been taken with the gear I'm talking about.

Daisies

24mm, F 9.0 @ 1/50 second, ISO 100

Copyright (C) 2008 Markku Heikkila

In March 2008 I went to local camera store to buy a DSLR while I was tired taking photos with my Ixus. My sister got a son just before that and I wanted to get good pictures of the newcomer. So I was thinking of buying D60 or similar. Even before that I tried to find as much information as I could from internet about starting level DSLRs. I don't know how but all together I found out that Nikon was more made for me than Canon. Sorry Canon people, I know that there are some advantages and disadvantages over both brands. Anyway I thought that I need to confirm my conclusions at some local camera stores. So I surfed around all camera shops around Jyväskylä. And I have to say that I found very expensive ones with no service attitude at all and with prices very high. Fortunately I also found shops with very good service and prices very high. If anyone knows a place with a good service and LOW prices, my wife would be more than happy. At Foto Saarinen I got very good and friendly advices to go with Nikon D80 or I would soon be looking for one. They also advised me to buy Nikon 18-200mm VR as kit lens. I didn't do as they advised but I bought Nikon 18-55mm f/3.5 - 5.6G and Nikon 70-300mm VR because I wanted to shoot some sports. I haven't been shooting sports a lot, but 70-300 was my ultimate number one lens before I got my 24-70, but more about that later. This was my basic gear at the beginning.

Wedding couple

22mm, F 8.0 @ 1/100 second, ISO 400

Copyright (C) 2008 Markku Heikkila

Now one year later I still think that I made a good choice with the D80 body. A jump to the next class (D300) would have been too high for me. I have used every feature there is in D80 so anything below that would not have been enough and I would have ended up buying D80 sooner or later. I don’t know about the lenses I bought. I haven’t had opportunity to test 18 – 200mm Nikon so I can not say anything about it. But I can tell you that I was missing something from 55 to 70 mm before I bought my 24-70mm lens. I like to shoot portraits and if not in studio, the 70 – 300 mm lens is too tight with DX body. But now I’m so happy to be able to cover anything from 18 mm to 300 mm with my good lenses from 24 mm on.  

Game Ball
300 mm, F 5.6 @ 1/160 second, ISO 800

Copyright (C) 2008 Markku Heikkila

That’s all for now. At next post we will talk about tripods and flashes.

Starting new blog

Start

This is a new blog hosted by me, Markku Heikkilä. I'm a Semi-Pro photographer from middle of Finland. In this first blog I want to tell you some things about myself and my relationship with photos and photography. I started taking photos more seriously a couple of years ago when I was travelling to many eastern European countries for my work. That time I was shoting with my Canon Ixus. That time my photographies were more or less point-and-shoot-photographies. Actually you can find my early photos at my Finnish blog called matkamiehen.blogspot.com. In posts that are from year 2006 you can find pictures from Albania, Lebanon, Hungary etc. That was a fun time travelling around working days at clients' office and just taking some pictures for fun at free time. In the blog there are some newer pictures also at front page.


My DSLR

I bought my first DSLR early 2008 and after that my life has not been the same. I mean that it has little by little changed the way I see the world around me. First half a year I was just shooting what ever and when ever. I was just enjoying the great images I could get out of my Nikon D80. Then I found Alamy.com plus some other stock image sites. Because I believed that time that my pictures were the best in the world, I started to send my photos first to Alamy and later to other sites also. I don't remember how many times I needed to send new photos to them but one day I found out that I'm now selling my pictures online with Alamy.com, a big international picture agency. I went nuts and thought that "This is easy, and anyone who has a camera should be selling his pictures".

However, anyone who has anything to do with photo business knows that eventually I found myself with sale number zero. My photos were quire a good when considering that I had just picked a camera to my hands for the first time, but they were far away from industrial standards. Technical quality was okay because I had a good camera and I had learned how to use it technically correctly. But actually I didn’t know anything about taking photos from a self expression point-of-view. Plus I had no idea how hard business I had found. So I did set my camera aside for a couple of week or even months and said to myself "That's it - you can now start to find something new to your life. You are not going to be very good at taking pictures".

Some wedding photography

Fortunately, before I found out that photography is a hard work, I did take a couple of assignments as a photographer at my friends’ big days like wedding and graduation parties. And at that point when I was thinking that there was no way I was going to be good photographer ever, some of these events came whent I had promised to photograph. So here I am, ready to quit photographing, but still some of my good friends wanted me to take some pictures of them. If you know me, you will know that in most of the things that I get involved in I’m one of those persons who are always calling for quality. So I thought that if I just could find a way to learn things about wedding photographing maybe I could learn some tricks and tips how to get better. And I did found a couple of them, but the site that I was most impressed was http://digitalprotalk.blogspot.com/ where David Ziser was telling how he sees things at his work. I started to read his blog daily. And yes, I think that I learned a bit from here and there. At the same time I also found  http://www.kelbytraining.com/ that was a major way for me to learn how to use Photoshop and Lightroom for my favor at my photographing.

And little by little I could gain confidence that things that I have been doing were going to lead me to better results and I’m still on that road. My goal is that any time I pick up my camera to my hands I try to take better photos than ever before. And any time I sit down to post-process my photos I want to learn new ways to do it faster and more creativity way.

You are very welcome to follow my journey to better photography by Markku Heikkilä

This is all from now.