Tag: camera body

Photographic Gear – Miscellaneous

I’ve been using the pretext of touring my camera bag to carry on a general discussion of photographic gear. So far we’ve covered the camera bag, the camera body itself, lenses and filters. In this installment we will cover miscellaneous items.

If you haven’t seen the previous articles, here are the links:

Photographic Gear – A Tour of a Photographer’s Camera Bag

Photographic Gear – the Camera Body

Photographic Gear – Lenses

Photographic Gear – Filters

To complete the camera bag tour let’s look at some of the accessories we accumulate to support our passion for photography.

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Cleanliness

Let’s begin with that little pouch in the upper right hand corner. It contains, among other things, a microfiber cloth. It is used to clean lenses and filters. It’s important that we keep everything clean including the front elements of our lenses and/or the filters we place on them.

clip_image004The microfiber cloth is designed to clean without scratching. It can clear away dust and smudges. But I prefer a no-contact method and for that I use my Giotto Rocket. It’s designed to blow dust from our sensors but it blows dust from the front of lenses equally as well. So that’s my first choice for cleaning the lens. If that doesn’t get all the dust I reach for the microfiber cloth to finish the job.

But, as good as those two things are, neither of them can clean water drops from the lens. This of course can occur when you’re photographing near waterfalls, or the surf on the ocean or, in the rain. For these situations, a small square of chamois is perfect. It doesn’t scratch the lens but it soaks up the water.

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Photographic Gear – the Camera Body

I’m taking you on a tour through my camera bag and the first stop was the bag itself.

Click here to read the article: Photographic Gear – A Tour of a Photographer’s Camera Bag

The next stop is the camera itself. Now, by this, I mean the camera body, not the body and lens. I’ll talk about lenses later.

Like so many of us, my camera got put aside for quite some years. I was very active in photography in the 1970s. I took frequent trips to Yosemite, camping and exploring with camera in hand. I even worked in a photography studio lab for several years, learning the intricacies of color film processing and printing. But then things changed and time for photography dissolved. Until my daughter was about to be born in 1994, that is.

I bought a Canon EOS ELAN with a Tamron 28-200mm lens and shot countless rolls of film, mostly of the new joy in our lives.

clip_image002[4]I resisted the digital movement for a long time, preferring 35mm film. But when I finally joined the movement around 2000, I purchased a digital point and shoot with a big zoom lens. It was a Canon PowerShot Pro90 IS that I cut my digital teeth on with all of its 2.6 megapixels.

I tried to apply what I had learned in the film world for both color slide and negative films to the digital world. I also tried to apply what I had learned in the color darkroom to Photoshop. It took a while to realize that very little of the knowledge and experience I had gained carried over into the digital world. This required a whole new way of thinking, both in the field and in the digital darkroom. For example, with color slides, you normally want to underexpose a little to saturate the colors more. With digital, you overexpose a little to get more detail in the shadows.

clip_image004[4]It was in September of 2004 that I made the jump to a digital SLR when I upgraded to the Canon 10D. With a little over 6 megapixels, I was a big step up from the PowerShot. This is the camera I was carrying around in the duffel bag I mentioned in the previous article.

I did a lot of shooting with the 10D. I was intimidated by RAW processing at first so I shot in JPEG. Sadly, there are a lot of JPEG files that would have been great had I been able to capture them in RAW but, alas…. Eventually, I moved to RAW when I found a software program that made sense. Adobe bought the software when they were developing Lightroom. It made RAW conversion much less intimidating.

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