Ten Years of Photography
This collection is selection of my photographs from 2007 to 2017. I bought a Nikon D200 at 2007 and that marks the beginning of this hobby. Before that I had only used a pocket camera loaned from work, a Canon Powershot S40 that could hardly fit in a pocket. But that Canon could shoot RAW images and I think that the tweaking of the raw images was the thing that really got me into photography.
Because my work is in post production, I wanted to keep my photos more real. I have never felt much urge to do a lot of processing or "trick shots" in photography. I try to limit myself to the raw image processing without opening Photoshop.
I used the Nikon up until about 2011 very actively but grew tired of lugging it around. Furthermore the batteries were reaching the end of their life and new batteries are not that cheap, especially Nikon branded. I wanted something that I could always carry with me.
It is an eternal battle with compromises to choose a setup. I wanted to compromise the quality as little as possible so I didn't even consider any superzooms. I grew fond of the idea of fixed lens camera and Fujifilm X100 was just released. It has a fixed 23mm f2.0 lens. Also the quality of the sensor was very good. So for about 1000 euros I bought it in 2011.
Ofcourse the compromise with a fixed focal length camera is pretty severe. No optical zooming at all. There is some room for cropping though and that helps a bit. Still I have felt many times that I could take really nice image of some distant thing if I had a 100mm lens with me. I would say that portraits and the more abstract nature photos are the most obvious omissions in my later photography since 2011. In some ways I guess it is good limitation since those kind of pictures are more easily of pretensious kind and less "real". With 23mm lens everything is pretty "real" all the time.
The Fujifilm is now about 6 years old. It is still surprisingly good camera, but I would be ready for new setup already. I don't think I want to go back to lugging a heavy camera bag with me anymore so I will probably go with a mirrorless camera with a big sensor and lots of megapixels. Then I would only need two or three lenses and have a lot more room for cropping images in post.