Since I’ve been bombing around the world my Casio Exilm Z850 has been a constant companion. I rate it really highly (must write a review soon) – it’s constantly dropped from the height of my motorcycle tank bag, it’s been soaked by sea-water on at least two occasions and still it ‘just gets on with it’ and takes photographs that when I got the camera I thought were awesome and now, think are pretty good.

The time has come to replace this stalwart of my gadget armoury and I need your help. I’m totally stunned every month when Lonely Planet Images release the photos that have been added to the library over the past few weeks – and I want to take photos that make people go wow.

Some background – when I was in school I desperately wanted to be a Photo Journalist – I worked for the local paper for free and I badgered my Dad until he bought me an Olympus OM-10 from the local second hand stor

e – complete with ‘manual adaptor’. It had a light metre inside but other than that I was totally on my own. After months of paper-rounds and being paid to take my friends band photos I managed to scrape enough money to ‘upgrade’ the the Olympus OM-2n .

It made a big difference to my shots, as did the purchase of a 2x adaptor and, at great expense, a 75mm Olympus lens.  I held onto the dream of becoming a Photo Journalist right through my engineering apprenticeship (where the camera managed to earn me some money on the side in Caerphilly town centre of a Saturday morning) and right into University in Swansea, where finally, the dream died and I sold the camera for much needed rent money.

Since then I’ve had a succession of crap compact cameras that just didn’t cut the mustard. The Casio has rather re-ignited that old desire to take wonderful photographs and I find myself slipping it into manual as much as the fully automatic settings – I’ve even bought an old Konica Minolta 35mm SLR to mess around with (it’s been out of the bag once).

My composition needs a little work , I need to get my head out of snapshot mode, but I feel the old juices still flow and can’t wait to get back into thinking through a shot properly before I take it. So now the tough part – I need a new camera.

Requirements:

  • Tough
  • Light
  • Compact
  • Decent video mode
  • Solid lens support
  • Easy to charge (I’m running this from the motorbike / powermonkey)
  • Easy to transfer images (no propritary connectors – worst case – SD cards are good)

Let’s ignore the money side of things for the moment and work the ‘perfect world senario’.

What do you suggest? I have a totally open mind and no legacy kit to support.

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