Out with the old, in with the new.

A little less than a year ago I had purchased my second DSLR camera from Henry's Camera Shop. I decides to try out the Sony Alpha 100. It was in the price range that I could afford and was a 10.2 megapixel camera. My Pentax K100D which I am very happy with is only a 6 megapixel. Needless to say I was never very happy with the Sony 100. I found it very noisy even at ISO 400. That was bringing me back to the old days when ISO 400 film first came out. It was very grainy. There were a few other things that I was not happy about with the Sony but won't go into details.

So after doing alot of thinking I decided to trade in my Sony gear since Henry's has a policy of trading in and trading up. As long as your within the year of your purchase you will get 50% of the original purchase price. For me this was great as the Sony was selling for less than 50% on Ebay. Once Sony brought out the Alpha 700 then their new line of cameras the 200, 300 and 350 the price of the Alpha dropped like a rock in water.

I had thought long and hard as to the direction I wanted to go. I narrowed it down to either Nikon or Canon. Both companies make excellent cameras. Canon has a larger selection of lenses and the larger lenses for wildlife shooting are about 20-30% cheaper in price. This is not to say they are cheaper in quality as I have seen the majority of journalists using Canon cameras and lenses.

Both Canon and Nikon have image stabilization built into their lenses. Canon calls theirs IS or Image Stabilization. Nikon has VR or Vibration Reduction on the lens naming. If the lens does not have either of those in their designation then they are more than likely older non-image stabilized lenses. Sony and Pentax both have image stabilization built into the cameras. I am not sure which method works the best.

Lenses with image stabilization will tend to be higher in price than their older counterparts. This does not mean that the older versions of the lens are not still valuable. IS or VR is only really important for hand held shooting. If your shooting from a tripod for landscapes, macro or extreme wildlife photography, where the lens is impossibly big to carry then image stabilizing is not as critical. Some photographers turn off the image stabilization as they find it slows down the lens.

After doing more research and talking to various shooters I have met over the last year I decided to go with Nikon and in particular the D300. The D300 is a 12.3 megapixel camera which does not put it much above the 10.2 MP Sony. But it has alot of features that I found interesting. I won't go into all the features as I would be writing a book to cover them all. If your really into reviews you can read them online at www.dpreview.com. These guys cover just about everything dealing with photography and do so in great depth.

So far I have been impressed with the D300 and the 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 G VR lens that I got separately. This lens covers alot of the range I use for landscape shots as well as portrait. It retails for about $699.00 Canadian here in Ottawa. It is a great walk around lens for every day use. There are better lenses and worse lenses in the zoom range but this is Nikon's Super zoom with a 11:1 zooming ratio. I took some very nice shots of a sunset at Andrew Hayden Park a couple of nights ago. These can be found on my website under the Scenery/Sunsets2008 page. My website address is www.mtcmediaproductions.com.

Because I like to shoot wildlife the 18-200mm does not have the range I need. So I have ordered Nikon's 200-400mm f/4 . This is a good sized lens, from talking to the people who own this lens it is very sharp at both ends of the zoom. Being a f4 I would recommend only adding the 1.4x extender. This will drop your lens to an f5.6 which is good for birds in flight. If your shooting stationary slow moving animals then a 2x extender on a tripod should work fine in high light conditions. A 2x extender will drop your lens 2 f stops. I do not have the lens yet so I cannot comment on any degradation of the sharpness. But I would recommend using a Nikon extender even though they are pricey. Cheaper third party extenders might decrease the lenses sharpness.

When the lens comes in I will update my blog to let you know how it works.