When I was at University I badly missed my dog so decided to buy an early digital camera to have photos of him when I was away. The Fuji Finepix 1400z has laughable specs now with its 1MP sensor, 3x zoom, iso 100 max, bulky 4xAA batteries and unreliable smartmedia card. However the quality was a big step up from many of the 0.3MP MF devices at the time and being able to see your photos straight after and e-mail them was an incredible improvement to using film. This is a typical shot of a very wet Jake at one of his favourite spots:
I moved onto bridge cameras and then my first DSLR which was an Olympus E-500 which I bought because it was a good deal and I didn't understand DSLRs at the time. I stuck with the system for a few years after:
When Jake passed away and Alfie arrived I was getting fed up with the misbehaving Olympus E-3 so I decided to change up to full frame with the Nikon D700 which was a huge improvement with incredible autofocus, wide dynamic range and usable iso 6400:
I upgraded to the D750 which offered a bit more resolution and autofocus improvements:
I have a little Sony RX1 which is technologically a bit of a dinosaur these days but it offers an FF sensor in a very compact body with a sharp 35mm F2 lens making it ideal to take out on the bike with me:
Last year I started with FF mirrorless with a Sony A7SII and DJI Ronin-
SC with the intention of working on low light video but I'm not great with video and still struggling to get good results since I'm not spending the time I should. The clean high iso is impressive though:
I decided to try a Sony A9 just before Christmas enticed by the electronic shutter on it and unfortunately not been able to do much with it due to the lockdown but from what I've seen of it the camera is incredible. In normal use the electronic shutter is very quick, silent and no blackout then if you want to shoot fast it can sustain a blistering 20fps up to 240 shots with tracking continuous AF and still no blackout in the EVF.
I was thinking about my original little Fuji and its iso limit of 100 and wishing you could get a camera with super high iso that could photos in darkness which is what we have now. The dog was out hunting for a hedgehog late at night around half 11 well after the sun had set when I could barely see him in the low light but the camera managed to lock on with its autofocus and take this shot at iso 20,000:
I'm frustrated with myself for taking very few photos these days and need to make more effort to get out more and take photos so I work my way through all the bad ones to get back to getting good ones.