Boys and their toys

In between some long weeks and weekends away I have treated myself to a new toy — it’s been a few years since I last owned a decent SLR camera, so I finally treated myself to a very nice Nikon D80 digital SLR. It’s a very nice piece of kit and I’ve added a 50mm f/1.4 and 18 – 35mm zoom to give me a good range.

With all my commitments of late I haven’t had much of a chance to try it out but I did take it up to Suffolk for last weekend. It was my mum’s 70^th birthday and we headed up to Ipswich to help her celebrate it. While we were there we took a trip out to Orford, a little village on the Suffolk coast. So I took the camera with me to try it out in the wilds. And wild it was, with first wind then rain, and a couple of hours later we got a small blizzard!

But before the worst of the weather hit I got off a few snaps of the various textures and forms I found around the small quay. The sky was very cloudy but the Nikon still managed to pick out a very respectable level of detail and colour. Not the best of tests for it but I got a chance to see how quickly I could learn the many different settings and customisations. I’ve been using a compact camera for a few years now and I’m not used to being able to change so many settings, it’s enormously flexible.

Going through the images later I was very pleased. I’m also going to have to get used to dealing with RAW images, not the easiest and quite time consuming. For less important photos I think I’ll stick to just shooting jpegs as they take a lot less time to process. I’m loving the lack of distortion in the images, although I got used to it with my compact and would sometimes deliberately use it for effect.

So I’m very pleased with my new toy — I hope over the next few months to show a lot of new images taken it. I’m already planning a return trip to Barcelona for a week in July and it would be the perfect opportunity to give the camera a really good run for it’s money. Can’t wait…