photography - Digital SLR cameras

 A photo taken in low light with the tripod.


After my compact digital cameras I moved on to my present camera, my Nikon Digital SLR. This is big and heavy – I rarely carry it while hill walking, however is put to full use during our summer holiday away when I take hundreds of photos – last year it was of the machair!

This is a camera which allows you as the photographer to make the decisions on the basis the human brain can make better decisions at times than an automatic setting on a camera. However it is complicated and a bit scary. Often your experimentation leaves you with a fairly rubbish bunch of photos. Sometimes I think my brain is not wired the right way to understand and appreciate this camera’s potential, and if I learn how to do something I have forgotten it for the next time. However you can learn in stages, using the automatic setting or doing things partially automatically.

A major benefit of any digital camera is the LCD (liquid crystal display) that allows the image to be viewed immediately after taking it. You can also delete it immediately, and try again. This display makes it easier to frame the picture too.

The advantages of the SLR are speed and responsiveness. There is no shutter lag and issues with struggling to focus, this camera responds when you want it to. It has a mechanical shutter (rather than an electronic one) which means once you press, it opens.

Within the camera there are a lot of lenses – the same camera is capable of zoom and macro photography.

You can capture photos when there is not a lot of light and you can do this without a flash, the digital sensor is very sensitive to light. It is also very good for motion photography.

And all the thousands of photographs can be stored electronically e.g. on computer, USB, the cloud, and they can be easily edited e.g. by using photoshop.

 A photo taken with macro (I think). If you zoom in the dandelion clock is still sharp.
A photo taken with the telephoto lens. It brings the beach forward.

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