Between The Sprockets A photography blog

No Stranger To Digital

I'm no stranger to digital.  My intrest in photography started with digital a while ago and peaked when I bought a Canon 350D digital SLR.  That is when I really started to learn about cameras and photography in general.  With it's instant feedback, digital photography is a great way to learn without becoming too discouraged.  If I had to wait a couple of days to get film back and spend time scanning it in just to discover I didn't do it right, I probably would have given up a very quickly.

When finances got tight for me, I needed to sell a few things to catch up.  First up was the camera, lenses, filters and accessories which I had grown to love.  I didn't want to sell them, but surviving does take priority over photography.  For a couple of years I wanted to get back into it, but could never justify the expense.

I don't know why it took me so long to realise it, but one day it dawned on me that the skills I had learned on my digital SLR should easily transfer over to a film SLR.  I dugg out my father's Canon EOS3000 film SLR, bought myself a roll of Ilford XP2 black and white C41 film and headed to brisbane to se how I went.  I was a little rusty, but overall it felt great to be out taking photos again.

This is where my love for film started.  With the realisation that film SLR's had now become crazy cheap, I could build up a kit of very good gear for far less than the price of a digital SLR body.  I began buying almost any film camera I could get my hands on, the more bizarre, the better.

Recently, older digital SLR cameras have started to come down to reasonable prices, and I have been looking at them again.  I still hadn't been tempted to buy one as the price of lenses are still too high.  Canon and Nikon bodies still take the same lenses they used to, so the demand is still there and the prices remain high.  So I was looking at the cameras in a pawnbroker expecting the usual Canons and Nikons when something caught my eye.

The Konica Minolta 5D is not a common camera, but from what I read and from what I have experience so far, it is a brilliant little digital SLR.  Both Konica and Minolta have cemented themselves in my mind as quality manufacturers after using some of their film gear, and knowing that the 5D has the Minolta AF mount, I could use my existing Minolta lenses on it.  That's all I needed to know, and a few minutes later, I  was the owner of a digital SLR once again.

I'm not giving up film though, far from it.  I'm still experimenting, but hopefully I can use both to improve my skills in general.  This blog will still concentrate mostly on film photography though.