{"id":284,"date":"2009-03-03T18:20:09","date_gmt":"2009-03-03T18:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelondonbiker.com\/blog\/?p=284"},"modified":"2009-03-03T18:20:09","modified_gmt":"2009-03-03T18:20:09","slug":"help-find-me-a-new-camera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelondonbiker.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/help-find-me-a-new-camera\/","title":{"rendered":"Help find me a new camera"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Since I’ve been bombing around the world my Casio Exilm Z850<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> – and I want to take photos that make people go wow.<\/p>\n

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

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<\/a> .<\/p>\n

\"\"It made a big difference to my shots, as did the purchase of a 2x adaptor and, at great expense, a 75mm Olympus lens.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> as much as the fully automatic settings – I’ve even bought an old Konica Minolta 35mm SLR<\/a> to mess around with (it’s been out of the bag once<\/a>).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Requirements:<\/p>\n