After several years of occasionally taking photographs with my iPhone, which includes an amazingly good camera but is not in the slightest ergonomically designed as a camera, and rarely taking my Canon EOS Rebel with me (because the camera and its lenses are so damned heavy and complex), I decided to spring for a new, "user friendly" camera and bought a Fujifilm X100F digital camera.
What a lot of fun! It's really not any simpler to operate than the Canon, but with the help of a Vancouver photographer who has a well-designed and useful web site, I got the camera set up for "street photography" and have gone out a couple of times to photographically explore my world (near and within Stanley Park in Vancouver), and captured this image...
...and this one...
... and this one:
I've been taking photographs semi-professionally since I was about 18, and operated my own photo studio for a decade after I got bored and a bit burned out with teaching. I learned basic photography using my high school's 4X5 Speed Graphic camera, and have owned and used probably a dozen other cameras, maybe more. The quality of images that new digital cameras can create is astonishing.
Thanks, guys. I live in Vancouver's West End, which is popular with tourists and locals alike because of its sense of community (which is tested often these days!) and its proximity to Stanley Park (the largest urban park in Canada), English Bay, Coal Harbour, and even the North Shore with its ski hills and hiking trails (which manage to kill three or four people a year!). Anyway, it's a good location for photography.
@jbaxter5256, no, the Fujifilm camera doesn't focus closely enough to photograph single stamps. A close-up meniscus lens could probably be attached to it, but those lenses usually produce "pincushion" images — the edges of a stamp would all bow outward slightly. Plus, it can be fiendishly difficult to focus a hand-held or even a tripod-mounted camera on a stamp. For one thing, both the film plane and the plane of the stamp have to be parallel, a task I've found to be almost impossible. It all comes down to deciding how close to perfection you want a stamp image to be.
I would recommend a scanner over a camera any day. You can buy a good brand-name scanner for less than US$70, while the Fujifilm X100F will set you back a good $1500.
Good for you Bob, i am a born again reader..with stamps and the internet i got away from the books. Then i became interested in the life of John Burroughs a local naturalist,which led to his buddy Walt Whitman..i preferred Whitmans life story to his poems "leaves of grass."and the fellow that inspired them Ralph Waldo Emerson...he is a lot deeper thinker than the other two..have to read his paragraphs two or three times to get it. But i enjoy it.
I have just treated myself to a new DSLR a Nikon D3500 with twin lenses .My grandson who is a professional photographer is coming round this evening to show me how to use it,all the knobs and buttons .The instructions that come with it are rather inadequate.
Think I will have to buy the Dummies book ,I read a few pages of it on Amazon,ISO,F stops ,shutter speeds,WHAT !!!!!
Brian
If you buy an DSLR camera (Nikon user myself), I would recommend sitting down with the camera with the manual and try to learn what every control does. This will allow you to take it off "Auto" and use some of the features to get better photos.