Camera chit chat

I’ve been to see one of my friends.  He’s a photographer and unsurprisingly we got talking cameras, especially as I’m in the market for one (I have some money in my pocket money account which is a tad bored).

Before I get bogged down with all this camera chit chat, I feel I should praise the little camera in my iPhone. Most of the photos on my blog  were taken with my phone, so it’s a tough act to follow and I’m not 100% convinced I’ll be producing better photos with a fancy camera.

For now I’m thinking a new camera ought to have the following features:

1. be fairly compact as I don’t fancy lugging around an expensive, heavy load of kit
2. fairly cheap, not too expensive.  Under £500 would be nice
3. have a view finder which I can use without having to faff around with my glasses, or struggle to see the screen in bright daylight
4. have Wi-fi and easily upload photos to iCloud
5. be of reasonable quality
6. not be too fiddly to use
7. possibly have interchangeable lenses.  I like wide angle lenses (something like 24mm in old 35mm format equivalent) and also a “portrait” lens such as a 100mm (again, in old 35mm equivalent).

We quickly got talking about the technicalities and I quickly got bogged down.  I heard all about the merits of Lightroom, Photoshop and the like.

Well I’m not sure about all of that messing around.  I quite like the Apple app where you can easily enhance or crop an image where I will only play with it for 20 seconds and save it forever as it is.  That’s fine for me, I get some nice photos.

So I went off feeling a bit bewildered.

Stop press!

This morning I popped into John Lewis, I happened to be nearby in MK.  There were a couple of LUMIX cameras which met the above criteria and the deal was clinched when the Partner (the store’s lingo for their staff) said he had one of the cameras I was looking at with £50 off because of a tatty box.  So I got it for £377 – not bad for something that started off at £599.  This just goes to prove how often having a chat with a salesperson can often pay off; Amazon is all very well but I do appreciate being able to handle the cameras, ask questions and bag a bargain.

I’m really looking forward to having a play but I still feel daunted about playing with Raw files, tinkering with JPEGs and so on.  I need a crash course in how to handle all of this.

Actually, instead of being daunted, I should be doing some self-talk and say how exciting this can be!  I could be opening up a whole new world!