I was writing a post about shooting on film and wanted to do a quick history of the cameras I have used since I started taking photos properly but realised as I was writing it that I've been taking photos for over 20 years so it started to go on a bit too long to be a quick intro. So here's a full post on my history of photography along with some photos from the various camera I like.

Olympus Stylus 410 Digital (up to about 2007)

The first digital camera I ever used. This was the family camera and I can't find any surviving photos that I took on this, unsurprising given ir pre-dates most cloud storage services and was from a time when photo storage was very limited. I main thing I remember from this camera was the way it opened, there's a bit at the front that slides left/right to cover the lens. There's one photo I remember taking on it, of our cat Marvin in a hedge with some blurry grass in the foreground and it was my first understanding of using depth of focus in photos.

Casio Exilim EX-Z50 (from 2007 to 2008)

I think this was another family camera by which I mean the one that anyone going away on a trip would take with them. Possibly I got this from my friend when he got his DSLR I can't remember. Looking over my photos a lot of which survive thanks to being on Flickr and me backing that up at one point this was where I was starting to learn how to compose a shot. This camera was only a bit better than the Olympus but I recall it being faster it was rechargeable as apposed to working off AA batteries. As you can see from the photos below I did not stick to standard aspect ratios at all.

Favourite Photos

Canon EOS 400D (from 2008 to about 2014)

I bought this while doing a paid internship during college, a wonderful time as a student where you can actually afford stuff! I think it was years before I really got the use out of this, probably when I started living in Dublin in 2011 and it was much easier to photograph interesting places. I bought a bunch of lenses for this camera and still use all of them. The first was a 30-70mm lens as an upgrade to the passable stock lens the camera came with. After that I picked up a 50mm lens which is great for portraits and then a wide angel lens for landscape photography.

Favourite Photos

Canon EOS 700D (from 2014 to now)

Not a lot to say about this one, bought entirely as an upgrade to the 400D. I still use it 12 years later I've never really felt much need to upgrade it.

Favourite Photos

Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ100 (from 2016 to now)

I got this to use as a travel camera to not have to carry around so much and it got a good bit of use as that but soon morphed into my gig camera. It has great optical zoom and once I built up the muscle memory it was really easy to get it into zone for shooting gigs in all sort of lighting conditions and from all sorts of locations.

Favourite Photos

Ricoh GR III

I bought this after having my eye on it for a few years but the price always put me off. It might be the best money I've spent on a camera as it reinvigorated my love of photography. It's so small that it's always with me, the presets are great for being able to take photos and being done with it rather than going home and dieting through RAW files and tweaking them. I did start to shoot RAW with it but I can transfer them to my phone and fine tune them there. Love it.

Favourite Photos