GEAR TALK

ne YouTube channel that I follow--and strongly endorse--is a nature/travel/camping/photography channel created by Slim Potatohead who is based in Alberta, Canada. 

    He did a video once where he discussed the camera equipment that he used.  It was one of his earlier episodes before his channel subscribers exploded to over 100,000 in less than 4 years, at the time when he was using some of the cheapest, even crappiest, gear you could think of. At the end he said something that stuck in my mind about how it is the individual's imagination, creativity, patience and persistence that really matters and not how fancy his equipment are.

    The camera is just a tool. Like any tool you can produce good or bad results with it, otherwise sky's the limit but there's no bottom to how low you can sink in mediocrity either. But the one thing that's definite is you are not going to come up with Pulitzer-prize material everytime you squeeze that shutter button. There will be bad photographs aplenty and you just have to keep taking them.

  Primarily, of course, I intended my blog to be a channel to express my thoughts in writing. But it cannot be avoided that people always ask what cameras and other equipment I use. After all, this is still also a hobby photography blog. I just happen to believe that even though a picture is worth a thousand words, it could still use a few more words in text and caption in order to tell a more complete story.

     My preferred cameras are two: a Nikon D90 and a Nikon D3200 and as I do own both, I try not to compare them to tell which one is "better." Each one complements the other. The older D-90 is sturdier and its in-body lens focusing motor has greater torque to drive longer lenses with heavier glass elements.  The newer D-3200 has a higher resolution at 24-megapixels which makes it my go-to unit for low-light situations. 

     Both are capable of recording 1080p HD video too but the D-3200 is quicker at following moving subjects in servo mode. The penalty for having a focusing motor that busy is noise, of course. I've never been able to shoot video with it that doesn't ruin the audio with the motor noise, something that the cat-footed D-90 does so well hands down. This means if I go on a trail hike  and wanted to travel light, not having to bring a stand-alone field recorder, the D-3200 stayed home--besides the fact that the D-90 was built like a tank. I think it must be a rule of sorts that the newer and pricier a camera gets, the more plastic it has. My older D-90 has a steel chassis and skin like an armadillo. I've banged it around pretty much without any lasting or even noticeable damage. I'm not sponsored by Nikon but I'm willing to say it has a well-earned reputation in build quality from way back in my active years as a photojournalist and editor.

     I only use about five lenses regularly: an 18-270mm all-range zoom lens made by Tamron, an 18-55mm medium wide-to-normal zoom lens by Nikkor that I use for portraits, a 300-mm fixed telephoto for nature and wildlife also by Tamron , a 12-24 mm ultrawide from Sigma for use in cramped spaces  and a 50-mm normal lens also from Nikkor. The two telezooms overlap in the low range, but the short 18-55mm is two f/stops faster. If you wonder why I still carry the 50-mm "normal" lens when 3 of its big brothers can take care of that range, it's because it opens up to an f/1.4 which means you can keep working even when you've lost the sun or your flash.  

    Occasionally, I would shoot video instead of still photos. Both Nikons are video-capable and depending on the memory card installed can shoot footages from 5 to 20 minutes long. I always thought footages under 20 minutes were too "short" until I realized that when editing the final movie in PowerDirector 17 you would actually very rarely use snippets longer than a few seconds at a time. 

    Long footages--those that stretch beyond 20 minutes continuously--are meant more for live reporting or full-length documentaries.   If I have to shoot longer videos that so far have not been useful for this blog, I use a Sony HDR-PJ675 dedicated camcorder--and even that has   a still photo "capture" mode that acts like a backup DSLR. Occasionally, I would use a ThiEye action camera if I needed GoPro-like flexibility. 

    The biggest advantage of action cameras is their ruggedness. Sealed snugly in their clamshell housings you could take it with you literally anywhere, doing everything from deep scuba diving to skydiving (neither of which I have done). That is comforting assurance if you're shooting in a place like Baguio City where it rains one-third of the year and afternoon fog is a daily phenomenon.  Humidity like that is murderous on the Nikons but means absolutely nothing to this diminutive little sports camera. I even tried immersing my ThiEye-130 in Burnham Lake to shoot the koi goldfish swimming in it and came off with a decently impressive shot that makes it look like I actually dove underwater.

   The main--or maybe the only--disadvantage of these tiny action cameras is power consumption. A fully-charged battery will NOT last 20 minutes. You'll need 3 or 4 spare batteries for a decent day's work. I saw this guy on YouTube once who drilled a hole in the clamshell housing so he could link the action camera's USB port to an external powerbank. He restored the clamshell's waterseal with silicone caulking. I really have serious doubts about that, and didn't have the courage (or foolhardiness) to follow his example.   

  Finally--and this may be a truly amazing surprise--when I'm caught totally unprepared and unequipped to deal with a "shoot it now 'cause it will never come back" moment, I whip out my humble SAMSUNG J7 Prime smartphone. Believe it or not, it really does take decent JPEGs and even 1080p video--so long as you don't intend to project the images on a wall.  As a bonus, if you use it for selfie, its built-in Photoshop cheat microchip makes me look prettier no matter how ugly I really am. 

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON