I bought a new camera; my third foray into the world of SLRs. My Nikon D90 has treated me well over the last few years, but I’ve been thinking about a new one for the better part of a year. I hadn’t been using my camera a ton, but I got back into it over the last year or two with the settling of our lives in Seattle. I’d always been interested in the difference between full frame (FX) cameras and cropped (DX) camera, but never had a good reason to upgrade to FX. Then, I took these pictures last May with my 50mm f/1.4 – a prime lens that has no zoom. I got lucky that the focal length worked amazingly well for these shots, but I realized I wanted more flexibility without having to replace all my lenses.
Enter the D610*.
I actually wasn’t sold that I was going to upgrade, but some passive shopping let me geek out about it. I’m generally pretty tight when it comes to buying myself things, so I mulled it over again and again and again for months. One thing led to another and I convinced myself that were there ever a time to upgrade, it was before I had a kid (more on that over at family.derecola… eventually). I have to admit that hearing a few people tell me I should do it helped. Like I said, I don’t really like spending money on tangible goods just for me. I ordered the camera late last week and, in an amazingly coincidental fashion, it came the day Dominic was born. I was actually paranoid about going into the long weekend without it. Turns out I was right, because Melissa’s water broke a mere six hours after it was delivered. Just long enough to charge the battery! After using it a bit during the birth, I have to admit that I’ll need to read the directions on this one.
I don’t think I’ll be taking concert photos any time soon, but I’m looking forward to taking pictures of family adventures. Cell phone and Facebook make a good combination, but there’s something archival about having a cluster of photos from a significant event in your life that you don’t immediately upload. I think, for me, photography has always been about telling a story. Hopefully I can tell some good stories about raising my son in a beautiful part of the country. I forsee a lot of shallow depth of field pictures of Dom with nature in the background. 😀
*If you want to know all the reasons I picked this model, other than it being FX, read this review. Ken Rockwell has helped me picked most of my gear over the years, so I trusted him to guide me through this purchase as well. I’m not sold on mirrorless… yes, I understand the benefits… so it was a cheaper FX Nikon dSLR for me.