My photo gear

I like gear, but I don’t like spending money. Good photography gear is expensive, so I make due with the best I can. I’m proud to say that my stuff costs less then what some photographers pay for a single lens.

My first camera was my Dad’s Ricoh RX7. I wrote a review of it once before. Essentially it was a small, lightweight, aperture priority 35mm with functions that were found on better cameras. The only lens I had was a 50mm 1.7 that was more then good enough. I started with it in high school and became addicted to SLR photography. My uncle gave me a junky enlarger and darkroom equipment, I bought an Ansel Adams book and got busy.

One day my wife crashed my truck when I let her drive us back from taking some pictures. My photo stuff flew out of the bed and the Ricoh was broken. I took it over to a Carbondale camera shop to get fixed and bought a Pentax ME Super for about 200 dollars. The Pentax was my worst ever camera purchase. It came with a horrible 35-70mm 4-5.6 zoom that took lifeless fuzzy pictures. After only a few months of use the aperture coupling started grinding and getting stuck. I had to take it back to the camera shop and get it fixed. A few months later the camera started having problems advancing the film and winding the shutter, sometimes it would take two or three tries to get it cocked. Finally it quit working completely. I took it apart lost all the pieces then gave it to a friend who had a similar camera.

Even though I had trouble with mine the ME super was actually a good camera design when it worked, it was super small, very light, and had nifty pushbutton shutter control and aperture priority automatic mode.

Fortunately a short time after the ME Super started giving me problems I came across a super deal on a Nikon F2AS. Probably the best ever fully manual 35mm SLR . It is a fully manual camera that is exceptionally well built. It is really an amazing machine. It works flawlessly and smoothly at all times. My photography really improved with the Nikon but it didn’t really have to do as much with the camera as it had to do with something the camera came with, a polarizing filter. Using the polarizer brought forth color in my photos that I had only imagined and my black and whites became bolder and far more contrasty. The sharp lenses also helped, a pristine, 50mm 1.8 and 28mm 1.9

Sometime in here I bought my first digital camera, a Pansonic PSVD4090. It wasn’t bad and made good snap shots. I have over 2000 photos me and my wife took with it. She usually carried it while I packed a camera bag with two bodies and 3 lenses, and a big flash. Then she would gloat about taking better pictures.

My next camera purchase was made in mid 2004. I read an article in shutterbug about the Kodak DCS 520 and how even though it was only 2 mega pixel and over 5 years old it was still a good way to get into Digital SLRs. The article stuck in my head and fermented until I had no choice. I bought one that had been employed at the LA times and was probably originally purchased for over 10,000 dollars, maybe as much 35,000 for the first few. Mine cost about 400 on ebay. I got a camera but no lens. I bought the cheapest EOS lens I could find, a Canon, 28-90 4-5.6 zooming piece of crap. With this soft lens and the attached Anti Aliasing filter my shots were much softer then I was used to, to the point of being blurry almost. To correct the problem I got a 50mm 1.8 and took the AA filter out.

My pictures became much sharper. I have been using this camera ever since. I’m starting to think about upgrading to a D60 or newer Canon body. I really haven’t ran into many problems with the 2mp resolution but it would be nice to have more pixel to crop and what not as well as a smaller camera. Also I am sure the technology has come along way in 6 years.

My tripod is composed of legs I got at a Rummage sale. They were originally from a old video tripod, I took off the huge spring loaded head and replaced it with a cheap Bogen 3 way. Total cost, 26 bucks. It works, but only barely.

Many of the images on my website were scanned with a piece of crap scanner I bought for about 20 bucks in 1996. A friend loaned me a Epson perfection 1660 which is way better and he has never asked for it back.

Some of my pictures are lighted with a Vivitar 2800 flash, others with a Metz CT-45. I haven’t bought a modern flash yet.

I started using Adobe photoshop and pagemaker while working for my high school newspaper. I pretty much learned them through trial and error. I use Photoshop 7.0 and CS2 now. I like Nik plugins and Fred Miranda’s super awesome scripts for photoshop.
I like ACDsee for looking at pictures. I use Kodak’s Photodesk to develop my RAW files. I like Macromedia Dreamweaver for webdesign.

My current gear

Kodak DCS 520,
Canon 50mm 1.8
Tokina 17-35mm 3.5 4.5

Cokin Filters

Vivitar 2800 flash
Metz CT-45 flash

Tamrac Backpack

Junky old tripod

Several version of photoshop including CS2

Total investment >800

My old gear
(collecting dust)

Nikon F2AS
Pentax ME Super
Ricoh RX-7

Beseler 67C Enlarger
Boxes of various darkroom equipment