Articles on photography

Introduction

Photography is at this moment my main hobby. I admit I just start to take some pictures, so I'm not so skilled... Anyway, when I find something that begin to capture my attention, I immediately want to know everything about it. So everything started in winter 2004, when I made the decision to starting with photography.

My tribute to photography has two faces: my photo galleries and my articles.
I'm sorry, but all my articles are in italian... I think there are so many articles about photography in english and so few in italian, so it should be more helpful an italian photo article that an english one.

My gear

The first thing I was looking is obviously the camera. I want to begin practise photography without spend much money and much time, in the sense I would like to take many picture as possible, changing aperture or ISO speed or F-value. Digital cameras are perfect for this, in my honest opinion: it's possible to verify immediately the results, a big flash card can hold hundreds of pictures even at best resolution, every image file carry Exif data, no film development but just file transfer, and last but not least digital photo retouching is a huge world itself.

Next, I decide to discard digital SLRs: I know they have many and important pros, but they are pricey and not easy to carry comfortably during holidays and weekends, usually with my love Stefi, and she hate to wait me to much every three steps...

So I decided for a digital camera. Theese were the features I was looking for:

• Sensor size more than 4 megapixels
• Quite wide lens range, better if 28mm to 200mm (35mm equivalent)
• All stuff about priorities and manual functioning

After days of web surfing, I found that the (nearly) perfect camera for my needs was Minolta A1. It's a prosumer camera, very well built, full of pro features, good lens quality, high usability and comfort, good image quality, very fast operation. The only drawbacks I found is noise at high ISO speeds, difficult focus at low lights, short picture buffer and low frames per seconds, as every other prosumer digital camera.

My new gear!

I made a big step towards perfection: I bought a Minolta 7D (april 2006, just before my wedding)!
What a camera... It's the big brother of Minolta A1, it seems a brick. Lot of buttons and wheels, I love it. I also bought the Konika Minolta 17-35/2.8-4 D (new), the famous "beercan" Minolta 70-210/4 (used), a prime Minolta 50/1.7 (used) and the beautyful Minolta 35/2 (used).