It was confirmed yesterday that I’m getting the opportunity to spend two weeks in Sydney at the end of March, and it has me very excited. I’ve been in Sydney once before, 5 years ago at the very start of 2005 (my first night there was spent at the Opera House for the New Years Eve celebrations – a nice way to start any holiday). This trip is primarily for business purposes, but I should have a few days to myself also. Most importantly of all, on this visit, I will have my D700 at my side at all times.
5 years ago I was shooting digitally with a Fuji Finepix s5000 – what the Fuji marketing gurus called a “prosumer” camera, to make you feel like it was almost a professional camera. Of course it wasn’t – it was a chunky point-and-click with a 10x optical zoom, but it did allow full manual control – something that many cameras even now don’t allow. As a stepping stone from a compact digital pocket camera to a digital SLR it was perfect, and while I owned it I also took the Digital Photography course at Dublin Camera Club – my first interaction with that club which has become so important to my photography now.
It was still quite a good camera at the time, and it’s interesting now to see how far digitial camera technology has progressed in 5 years. Take this photograph of the Sydney Opera House, which I suspect I will photograph once or twice at the end of March – the last time I couldn’t stop photographing it from every possible angle, so why should that be any different this time! The image was shot from a moving boat, so isn’t the sharpest in the world. It was also shot at dusk, so isn’t the brightest. It’s quite noisy too, and that’s because it was taken at ISO 400. That seems like a low ISO now, but 5 years ago on a compact sensor that was pushing the limits of the sensor technology – hence the noise.
Considering that what I can shoot today at ISO 3200 is (considerably) better than what the s5000 could do at ISO 400, I have every reason to hope that the images I come back from Sydney with after my two week visit will be leaps ahead of what I got on my first visit. That’s not factoring any improvments in my photography skills in general, or my knowledge of lighting, composition and the technical aspects of photography, all of which, I hope, will contribute to you seeing some very nice images from Sydney on these pages in about two months time.
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