Dave Brown

New toy!

Yes, yes, here I am posting about things again. Because lord knows you can’t have enough stuff.

Anyway, it was my birthday recently (thanks livejournal for reminding me of that; I would have forgotten otherwise), and Chie asked me if there was anything particularly that I wanted. It took me a bit of hemming and hawing and thinking, because I’m one of those infuriating people who, when they want something and can afford it, goes out and buys it, and when they don’t or can’t, just doesn’t do anything.

I mentioned that my little Casio digicam had recently died, and she said, “Fine. I’ll get you a new camera.” Well, that was a bit of a shock.

So about a week beforehand, she marched me into Yodobashi Camera and picked one. Japanese camera stores are not the sort of place where you pick the best of the three cameras available. The selection tends more towards an embarassment of riches. They had everything from little cheap toy cameras, to actual Polaroid-type instant cameras, to 35mm SLRs, to digital point-and-shoot cameras, to HD video cameras, to DSLRs.

I decided some time ago that I wanted to try and improve my photography skills, especially after seeing some of the wonderful photos that some of my friends take. So I wanted a camera that I could actually learn with—a DSLR, or at least something with a big enough lens that I could take reasonable pictures.

The result of her marching me into Yodobashi Camera, however, was more bafflement than anything else. The selection of cameras was so vast that it didn’t take me very long at all to go into information overload. So I begged off and asked her for some time to do some homework.

I accomplished that on the Saturday after my birthday by trolling around all the local electronics stores and seeing if there were any particular bargains I could find.

Often, I’ve found that when shopping for something I want, there’s one thing that just leaps out at me—for instance, I once went to a shoe store in Saskatoon and the staff asked me if there was anything I was looking for. “No,” I told the guy, “just looking to see if there’s anything that jumps out.” After a bit, I found an awesome pair of boat shoes with a checkerboard design. “You know how I said I was looking for something that jumps out?” I said to the staffer, “Well, it just did.”

So after walking around Bic Camera in Omiya for a bit without anything particularly jumping out at me (although the Pentax K-x did tempt me—but at its price tag, not so much), I tried another store: Sofmap. Turns out that Sofmap is just a subsidiary of Bic Camera these days, but on the other hand, I went in and had a look around, and once again Pentax leapt out at me: the Pentax K-m, known in other parts as the K2000. Which they had on clearance for ¥38,400. So that was what I’d decided on—only a little more expensive than a point-and-shoot, but it actually takes 35mm lenses. Granted, it’s only a 10-megapixel camera and newer cameras are 12 megapixels, but really, once the megapixel race went past 7, there isn’t really anyone save an obsessive poster printer who would notice the difference. And the obsessive poster printer probably makes his living from photography, so it’s worth it to get a really high-resolution camera.

So the next day I went back there with her this time, and with a sad trombone noise, I learned that the clearance units had sold out and the display unit was the only one left—and they’d jacked up the price because the normal retail price was greatly in excess of their clearance price. After a bit of hemming and hawing, Chie agreed to my proposal that I could pay half the cost of it. Then we went to bargain with the sales guy anyway, because hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

He originally wouldn’t budge, but when putting the kit together and reconstituting the original retail package, it turned out the lens cap had gone missing. The salesman was inconsolate—convinced he’d completely lost the sale merely over a lens cap. We suggested that maybe a bit of a discount could make up for the devastating loss, and he went to talk to his manager, and came back with the offer: ¥38,400. There was something a little familiar about that number, but there was no way we would turn down a ¥11,600 discount merely for the lack of a ¥300 part.

Which is how I now have My First Photographic Money Pit. If I’m not careful, I’ll end up spending all my discretionary money on glass, I figure. I took it out for a bit of a test drive today:

That wasn’t really my first photo, I thought thought it would be amusing to offer that as my first. Turns out the camera has a setting to make pictures look like they were taken with a Holga. Very nice.

I’m pretty sure the first thing anyone does with a new DSLR is take pictures of flowers, just because, hey, look how clear the images are! And macro mode!

I took this as a sort of challenge for the camera, to see what it could do. It was fully night time, and I’d specifically told it to not use the flash. Since I still have training wheels on, it decided that it needed a full 1.5-second exposure, so I had to put the camera on a bench to let it take its time.

The fun thing is, I have this wonderful camera and I have no idea how to make it go. And even so, with a completely clueless tyro at the shutter, it takes pictures that look nicer than any I’ve ever taken before. I’m going to have fun with this.