I’ve wanted to get a REAL camera for ages. The last real camera I had was a Minolta SRT101 SLR 35mm film camera. I’ve had lots of toy cameras since then with the closest to real being my Olympus C-785 Ultra Zoom. It has a 10X Optical lens and it’s got some manual control but it isn’t SLR.
I finally decided it was time so last week I bought a Nikon D5000.
It’s not quite professional grade but it’s very close. Professionals would say it’s a great starter camera but for me it’s great.
To show the power of a real SLR I took a few pics the other night. This one is taken outside at night when it was completely dark. I used the built-in flash so you can see just how dark it was. The F-stop was 3.5 and the shutter was 1/60 second.
This next one was taken at the same time except it was on a tripod and the F stop was 3.8 with a 25 second shutter speed.
You can see some lights in the shot but you would almost swear it was daylight. Look around the middle on the left side of center and you can see some trails from a car.
Here’s a pano made with photos from the new camera and Autostitch. Richard first showed me Autostitch. Pretty cool free program to make Panoramas.
I think I’ll be happy with this camera for a long time to come.