Sunday, July 06, 2008

Camera upgrade

A couple months back, my Cannon SD100 died. I may have dropped it or it was in my backpack and slid off the wing of the airplane to the ground...I really don't remember. What I do know is that I tried taking an in flight picture of an MD-80 landing on a parallel runway but the viewfinder was all messed up. Seeing as I was the acting safety pilot, the camera quickly went back into the flight bag. After I got home, the camera would take pictures like this:



Eventually, they started to look like this:


Nice, eh? Cool effects and pretty colors aside, either way, not good and tend to get in the way of cool things like airplanes...oh, and family, the dog, etc. Wait, the dog *is* family. The cat too :-)

What to do...what to do?

I've always wanted to get back into photography but never made the leap to a digital SLR camera. I asked a bunch of friends, the ones that take awesome pictures, for recommendations, what they like, dislike, etc. A couple weeks ago, a flight instructor friend and I headed to the Golden West EAA fly-in where I was able to borrow his Nikon D80. Wow, what a difference and extremely easy to use. Some of the results:


Relentless


F-18 demonstration


Hawker Sea Fury


Nice looking T6

In short, I was sold and wound up buying the D80 from my friend. Now it's time to learn as much as I can and experiment by taking lots of photos. At least it's digital so mistakes are free, right? :-) All that stuff from my high school photography classes is coming back to me. Mr. Schwerin would be well pleased.

I'm now set in the camera department for my upcoming trips to Oshkosh and down the East Coast.

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