Canon EOS 10D

When I first waded into the digital photography waters for real, this is the camera that helped me learn to swim. The college where I work purchased it for the students on the newspaper staff, and I practiced with it when the students weren’t using it.

Though it’s a fine camera, I don’t do much with it anymore. It’s a bit outdated, and some newspaper staffers didn’t take good care of it. Quick aside to my current students: this is why you don’t get “loaner” cameras from the college while you’re in photography classes.

You may find this camera in captions here and there, but most of the pictures in this blog were taken with one of the Nikons.

Nikon D7000

Until I bought the D810, this was my “workhorse” camera. Because of its ease of use, it’s currently doing duty as my classroom exercise camera at work.

Though it’s a crop sensor, it produces good quality images and includes several features I really love. One of the biggest draws is that it has control wheels in front and back, which allow a user in manual mode to easily change shutter speed and aperture. I also work a little easier knowing that it has slots for two memory cards, making it highly unlikely that I’ll run out of storage space (even shooting in RAW format).

The only two reasons I might not recommend this camera to a beginner are the wealth of options (the settings menus can get downright confusing even to someone with experience) and the price (right around $1000 when I bought it new, camera only, from Wolfe Camera in Topeka).

Nikon D3000

This is the first digital camera I ever bought for myself (I’d done the purchase process for two digital SLRs for work before I decided to start spending my own money). It’s currently not seeing a lot of action. I rarely take it out by itself. However, I sometimes take it along with the D810. I find it helps me to have one camera with a standard, middle-of-the-road lens and one with something more specialized (such as a telephoto or fisheye lens).

It came bundled with a lens for around $450 (refurbished, purchased directly from Nikon). Though it’s a little harder to use than its more expensive cousins, it may be a more practical plan for a beginning photographer on a budget.

100th entry

Canon EOS 10D, 17mm (17-40), 1/2, f/4.0, ISO 100, adjusted

To celebrate the 100th entry in The Photographer’s Sketchbook blog, here’s another shot that I took at around the same time I shot the photo in the first entry.