Camera help!

[Jenny]

I've been eyeing up your photos with real envy!

I've got a secondhand rather ancient Canon digital with pathetic zoom or else it's film - got four pentaxs and a wide range of lenses but it's expensive to send them away and a real pain to edit when they come back! So I'm going to have to bite the bullet and get something better - it'll have to be second hand as I don't have much money but would welcome advice as to what I should be looking for.

[Shamal]

Secondhand Pentax digital slr? If your Pentax lenses are fairly modern, then you could use these on the dslr.

Unfortunately bird photography is an expensive business, dslr cameras are a lot cheaper now but the lenses often needed still cost a bomb.

It may be the case that you just put everything up on ebay and see what comes in, then start over again.

You can get used cameras from a dealer, cost a bit more than a private sale but you get some guarantee.

If you have some sort of budget, let us know and we can work from that.

Regards,
Shamal

[Georgieone]

Jenny - Just a vague suggestion - before you decide what camera etc., to get interested in - write yourself a list of everything you REALLY want to photograph - then think of the equipment you REALLY need to do this. Then start looking - Shamal does make a lot of sense.

[Jenny]

Shamal/Georgieone.

Ok, Will try and give more info.

For a start my slr's are pentax's SIa /SPF/Spotmatic II - all functioning if battered for circa 40 years hard use. Lenses range from wide angle to 500mm; I also have close-up attachments.

I have a max budget of £500 - can't afford much on a gross income of under 13K a year - :D

I don't do happy snaps. Most stuff (apart from close-ups of flowers and geological structures is distance orientated - birds, whales and dolphins and views including bad light and nightscapes.

Thanks for your comments - does any of the above help? :confused: Jenny

[Shamal]

Pentax changed from a thread mounted lenses to the K bayonet mount in the mid 70's. If you have the latter, then you could be in luck using them with a modern Pentax dslr like the K10D (£550), although I would check before buying.

The good thing is, the K10D has built-in image stabilisation, so you may not be getting a modern feature like AF with your old lenses, but at least you have the luxury of I.S.

Also, you will get a focal length boost with a dslr of around 1.5x due to the size of the sensor taking a crop from the image, good news for distance work, bad news for landscapes.
Another bonus (or negative) will be increased depth of focus from a cropped sensor compared to 35mm film or a full frame sensor.

So, if all goes well and your lenses are compatible with the Pentax dslr cameras, then you will have your digital dream but have to stick with manual focus.

Otherwise, it will be a case of selling up and starting with a budget dslr and struggling to afford any glassware.

regards,
Shamal

[Georgieone]

Jenny - I totally agree with what Shamel is saying. It is what I did myself but it had to be Canon as that was what I had before. Good luck.

[ExtraMedium]

Last night I spotted that Jessops still have a deal going for a K100D for £299.

OK, it's not the same thing as a K10D but the IS is still there and all you'd suffer is a 6.1Mp instead of the 10Mp or so that the K10D has. Actually, that's very probably nothing very much to worry about, given the nature of sensors. Might not be the biggest but it's a total steal at this price.

I know a few people with the K100 in both of it's two forms and they are both very happy indeed as it is a really great camera (it just got novice DSLR of the year award I think) I would buy one in an instant if circumstance had not just eaten my emergency fund!:mad: It has a lot of very nice abilities, and the colour rendition is really very impressive! Great build too. Excellent design, lots of niceties that others don't have, and totally practical. The Kit lens is not bad, but some of your others might work, and there's a very nice sigma for it for not too much cash too. As a bonus it can take regular AA cells as well as rechargable NiMH, so you'll never be stuck for power when the shot of your life is in front of you waiting to be taken, this because thanks to the widespread uptake of the walkman, you can buy and AA cell almost anywhere you look. You can't do that with a manufacturers' "special XYZ" or whatever battery is in some of the more exotic cams. Spares of those exotics cost plenty too, far too much in fact.

Sorry, got a bit over excited there, but this really is a special camera for an awful lot of very practical reasons!

Hope this news has not come too late and you could still pick up a total bargain like this one! It's just superb value. (really miffed I can't get one as it's been on my "must get" list for a good six months now, and always said if it got to that price I'd certainly do something about it, if the deal stands for long enough I still will too! Sadly I can't see it happening being realistic though:()

I'd have said something sooner but I've only just joined this forum in the last day or so. ;)

If you want to see results, head over to S5000.net, and in the forums there (called discussions) look for pics from "Douglas" and or "Rachel Marie", they have pics online there and you can easily see for yourself what a great result this cam can produce. Douglas's humming birds pics are simply stunning, and I know they will get even better, quite soon as he masters his new baby more fully. RM's shots are really top notch too, but I'm far less knowledgeable with portraits.

http://www.s5000.net/phpBB2/index.php

My first link here so I hope it works.:)

Good luck with it.

[Jenny]

Many thanks, all, for your very helpful advice! Fraid it's going to have to be try and sell the lot as all my pentaxs are screw-thread! Doubt if anyone will want them!!

ExtraMedium - welcome and thanks for the Jessops tip. I'm going to have to phone them tomorrow because the carriers they use are notoriously unreliable here and often charge extra on top of the £9 Jessops charge for delivery to the Highlands and Islands. :(

[ExtraMedium]

Many thanks, all, for your very helpful advice! Fraid it's going to have to be try and sell the lot as all my pentaxs are screw-thread! Doubt if anyone will want them!!

ExtraMedium - welcome and thanks for the Jessops tip. I'm going to have to phone them tomorrow because the carriers they use are notoriously unreliable here and often charge extra on top of the £9 Jessops charge for delivery to the Highlands and Islands. :(

I've been using Jessops quite a bit this year, they are not my number one choice, but I think cameras are free shipping, and also there are vouchers for some items (ask me if you need to know more about that, but I'm pretty sure cameras are NOT qualifying purchases). It may be there is a surcharge for your area, I understand that is quite common. (been researching a move there myself so it caught my eye!)

Failing that, I use a Fuji S9600. It's not a DSLR, however if you've been used to older cameras you might find it's close enough to be another potential candidate. It does have a fixed lens, but it's a 28-300mm equivalent. You do have to work a little harder to get good shots. I used to have a good SLR camera about 35 years ago, and I have to say it way outperforms that one! Given the age of your kit, you might find it more than acceptable, and it's a lot cheaper again. I used Dabs.com to get mine and it was £299 last December, and I reckon I got a bargain, but now it's being sold there for £252.98, which is amazing value for what you get. Again not a first choice supplier for me, but I have had adequate service and the delivery might be more straight forward with them I suspect. I had a fair deal on it in my view. I would not want to have to return it to them though as I've found their after sales can be a bit robotic and bland for my tastes. (they were recently purchased by BT, which could explain it). I'd not order unless they have stock as that is another area that could stand a good overhaul. That aside, they are fine. No rips or surprises, and pretty reliable, with good price performance. Often the best in price matches I've found. (must do huge volume)

You can see my and others' pics from that camera in the same forum I mentioned earlier (same nickname as here), but bear in mind a couple of things, I got the fuji-chrome bug a few months back, so colour is boosted in a rather 1970s style, but that is strictly optional on that camera, you can take normal colour too. Also I added a bit of extra glass, and so some of my shots are a bit more zoomed that the basic camera does, but it does do 10.7 X as standard optical and 2X that on top for digital zoom, which in this case is not too bad. I added a 2.2X on top of that for a whopping 47X zoom or so, but a tripod is essential by then of course. It does need lot's of light, but that's just a quirk with the cameras sometimes these days. It's not a point and shoot camera though, yo udo have to know what you're doing, or so I am told, but because I'm old school I always had to do that with cameras in the first place, so I got no complaints, as it does far more for me than my old cameras used to anyway! Lastly a 35 year break from photography has left me a lot of catching up to do, so don't expect David Bailey in my work or anything like it! To date, I did manage one or two reasonable snaps here and there though.:)

Hope it helps.

Sorry if I rambled a bit, but it's not something I'd imagine you'd want to take too casually, getting it wrong, or it not suiting you, is not a good way to go in the case of buying a camera.

[Jenny]

Hi, ExtraMedium,

For all you being a bit rusty as you said in your post, there's some good shots there!

Thanks for your suggestions. I'm having a think and as we've got two professional photographers on the island plus two others coming over in a couple of months, I'm going to follow up on all the advice you, Shamal and Georgieone have given, do more research and pick their brains as well. Unfortunately one of the local professions wildlife photographers put his "small camera outfit" up for sale last year when I was off island for a week! That outfit covered nearly all what I've got in slrs and would have done me just fine! Murphy's Law!

Jenny

[ExtraMedium]

Thank you, and you're most welcome. Hope it all works out for you. A tiny caveat emptor; Pros will of course spend money on cameras like it was water, and they get the tax back at some point. In their case it's just flat out worth it to be hassle free etc., and they don't dare compromise at all really. Amateurs have some small mount of room for manoeuvre in, thankfully.

Feel free to PM me if you should come to the buying rechargable batteries bit and feel a bit lost, it's bit of a mine field, but with a few simple points covered, you can get a good deal and reliable kit pretty much first go most times. Nicads were one thing, but getting the best end of a deal with the newer NiMH and a charger without spending an absolute fortune can have a few pitfalls worth avoiding the first time around, as I found out the first time, but not since then! :) All that glitters is most definitely not always gold!;)

[Jenny]

Ian - message understood - Jenny.