pierces

That's a good point. I got the 70-300 right after I picked up my A7III and use it on both formats. If one is staying with APS-C, your suggestion of the 70-350 is a good one. Dave

A random HAL ship in port at Skagway. Dave

Welcome to the family. First accessory purchase will (must?) be 2 additional batteries and a pouch for them. I loved my A6300, but it's definitely a two-battery-a-day camera on a long shooting day. The third battery is a highly recommended just-in-case. When you get around to a telephoto, I highly recommend the 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G OSS telephoto. It is very compact for its reach and performs very well with the A6300. I bought mine for the a6300 and still use it extensively with a a7r5V and my current A6600. Enjoy! Dave

Too bad Evel Knievel is no longer with us. Dave

That's why you take two cameras! The A7III on a strap and the A6300 in a belt pouch (quite compact, even with the. 70-300). A7III - 24-105 f/4 A6300 - 70-300 F4.5-5.6 Bridge cameras are pretty awesome, but once I went full frame, I just can't go back. Dave

FYI, the A6600 uses the same NP-FZ100 battery as the full frame cameras. Great battery life. Dave

All with the 16-50 PZ. The A6xxx series is really quite remarkable. It has all the functionality of the full frame Sony cameras, just with an APS-C sensor. Here is a link to one of our cruises shot with an A6xxx: https://pptphoto.com/albums/Travel/Cruising/2015 Fall Colors/index.html Dave

How big is your coat? 😉 I have gone through a lot of thinking and rethinking about cameras since going digital 20-odd years ago and I have finally hit what I feel is a sweet spot for me. The perfect camera for me turned out to be three cameras. For the grandkids' ice sports and other stuff where I value image quality over portability, I have a Sony A7rV. While it is very compact for what it is capable of, it isn't my choice for more casual walkabout shooting. Before I went to full-frame, I shot with Sony A6xxx bodies. Very compact and they really don't skimp on features. My current second camera is an A6600 that features in-body stabilization, very capable tracking autofocus at up to 10fps and has really excellent in-camera JPEG (good enough that I no longer shoot RAW). It has a full range of modes, including a true "manual" mode where you can live out "pro" photographer fantasies to your heart's content. Manual focus is electronic but very solid (at least with the lenses I own). With a smaller travel lens like the 18-135 zoom, it is very compact and might fit a larger coat pocket. With the super compact 16-50PZ "kit" lens, it is truly small. The new 16-50 PZ II is actually quite good. I had the older model and was always happy with the results (See photos below). It is in no way the perfect lens but the camera can and does apply moderate distortion corrections in JPEG. My third camera is actually my phone. I haven't owned a compact camera since about 2017 when phone camera modules really came of age. My current phone is a Pixel 9 Pro XL and it has a fantastic camera with a wide range of optical zoom from about 15mm equivalent to 100mm or so. As an "always" camera, it is better than any of the compacts I have owned and rivals the best of the current crop. Phones from Google, Apple and Samsung have a lot to do with the demise of compact cameras. Yes, they are expensive but are about on par with any current compact that can compete with their image quality (and they make phone calls too 🙂 ). There's my 2¢, (4¢ adjusted for inflation). Hope you find you perfect fit. Dave Compared to D300

Pictures taken between Monday, December 2 and Sunday, December 8. Welcome to December. If you can't find something inspiring to photograph this month, try harder! Enjoy the season and take some pictures. Rules: See above That's it. This isn't a contest. All photos taken this week are welcome (not just cruising). Prizes will not be awarded. Discovering the joy of photography is the prize. The idea is to get folks out using their cameras for more than vacations and toddler birthdays. Post one. Post many. Up to you. Have fun with your camera and share your fun with others!

Sunday was the First of December and day one of the Advent for 2024. During Amazon Prime Days a couple of months ago, Daughter Kassi saw an Advent calendar on sale that she thought I just might appreciate. With Die Hard being my all-time favorite Christmas movie, she couldn’t have found a better representation of the season for me. I have had it assembled and sitting promenently on the bar for a couple of months just waiting for the big day. That day has arrived and Hans Gruber has begun the well-deserved fall to his death from the twenty-fourth floor of the Nakatomi Tower that will end with the celebration of the birth of Jesus. If this seems somewhat non-traditional in your view, I understand. If it seems hilarious, welcome to my sense of humor! Advent Begins Dave

Sorry Colleen. I hate to throw cold water on medium format, but unless you are willing to spend an exorbitant amount of money on a digital MF camera, the bang for the buck just isn't there like it was back in the age of film. Even with the best MF camera currently available (the Phase One XT - 150MP - $56K, body only), you are still limited to a sparse lineup of very expensive lenses and except for a couple like the Hasselblad X2D 100c ($8.5K - 100MP - body only), you give up niceties like optical or in-body stabilization. If you go with film, you have to consider that you need to scan (a really good scanner if you want more than 8MP-12MP equivalent) the negatives to get digital content and those negatives come from film that has a minimal ISO limit and a dynamic range 2-3 stops less than digital. I can relate to the nostalgic return to an old film camera, but I can't bring myself to take a step backward in overall quality at the cost of multiple times the effort. I'm not pooh-pooing MF randomly. I researched it strongly when deciding on my move to full-frame and later to the A7rV and since I was raised in a middle-class family and can't cough up the astronomical sums to go with top-end medium format, I instead concentrated on high MP full-frame. What I found was a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-most. The A7rV will shoot ten 60MP frames per second at a fairly clean ISO12800 with class leading tracking autofocus that will adjust exposure via aperture, shutter, ISO on the fly. That fit my need for an action camera to keep up with the grandkids' sports or a breaching whale. The wide range of lenses make it an excellent (superb?) landscape or portrait camera (though for portraits, it can capture a little too much detail at times...thank God for Photoshop). In pixel-shift mode it can capture landscape or still-life images at 240MP by taking a series of images with a minute shift of the sensor for each image. The latter is a cool feature but is a tedious process to finalize and I have found the phenomenal Topaz Gigapixel AI software can match the output if you really need a 9ft by 6ft 300ppi image printed at native resolution. Original 60MP frame Snip from 3.7x enlargement in Gigapixel AI To be honest, the A7rV is not cheap, ($3.5k) and you need great glass to keep up with the resolution. That said, the body and a great f/2.8 standard zoom ($2k) would cost less than just the body of any medium format digital camera that can match or exceed its imaging capability. I would list the sky's-the-limit MF cameras that can match the autofocus, burst speed, lens availability and portability if there were any. Alongside the Sony, Canon and Nikon have recently released high-resolution full-frame mirrorless cameras in the same class that are priced in the same range. Again, I'm not casting aspersions on medium format, I'm just a fan of cost-effective, multi-purpose efficiency and with a 400lb bench-press a couple of decades in the past, I've become a big fan of portability as well. Dave

Quick fix... Dave

Pictures taken between Monday, November 25 and Sunday, December 1. Last week of November. I don't fully understand the nature of time and can't say for sure if it can fly, but even if it can only run, it moves along pretty quickly, dragging 2024 with it. So far this year, I managed to capture a lot of good moments and some sad ones. Whether happy or sad, I'm glad I captured them. Which is why I nag all of you to take the time to capture your world. Mandatory weekly nag: Take some pictures! Rules: See above That's it. This isn't a contest. All photos taken this week are welcome (not just cruising). Prizes will not be awarded. Discovering the joy of photography is the prize. The idea is to get folks out using their cameras for more than vacations and toddler birthdays. Post one. Post many. Up to you. Have fun with your camera and share your fun with others!

Friday was a sad day. We had to say goodbye to a good friend. We didn’t hang out every weekend, but that didn’t matter. Pre-pandemic, he and I went to the shooting range fairly often and whenever we had a family and friends gathering, he and Ronda were always on the guest list and brightened up the room. Steve was the sort of guy that if he saw a need, he would do what he could to fill it, no matter if the one in need was family, a friend or a stranger. When Daughter Tara has to vacate her house after her divorce, Steve was there with a truck to help us. It was a two-way street and I never blinked when they asked me to photograph their son’s wedding. His time on Earth is over, but he will live forever in Heaven and in our hearts. Fare thee well, Steve. Farewell to a Friend Dave

Everybody has heard a comment or two about when so and so puts up their Christmas decorations. Some are the commentators, and some are the subjects of the comments. This year, we only have to look in the mirror to find early decorators to mock. A Christmas season abbreviated by travel has forced our hand and we are decorating early. It is Kim’s favorite holiday, and to get her allotted span of enjoyment, we’re jumping the gun a bit this year. The tree is already up and running on a 5AM to 10PM automated schedule and the outside lights are next. Last year, Christmas decorating grew to include the redecorated patio and garden. As you can see in this week’s photo, Rusty and Longfellow are already joyfully sporting their dapper holiday apparel. Merry, merry! 'Tis The Season Dave

Pictures taken between Monday, November 18 and Sunday, November 24. Next week is Thanksgiving in the US! Take some pictures so you can give thanks that you did next week. Rules: See above That's it. This isn't a contest. All photos taken this week are welcome (not just cruising). Prizes will not be awarded. Discovering the joy of photography is the prize. The idea is to get folks out using their cameras for more than vacations and toddler birthdays. Post one. Post many. Up to you. Have fun with your camera and share your fun with others!

When I was in my teens, I had the idea that riding a unicycle would be cool. I have to say, that was a gravitationally focused learning experience. I not only came out of it with a terrific sense of balance, but I also learned how to take a fall...a lot of falls....an awful lot. 🙂 Nobody has ever been hurt or killed by a fall. However, that sudden deceleration at the end is a different story. Dave

https://a.co/d/3yGN6aD Amazon Canada! Dave

Consider a dual-purpose stick. This is designed for hunters, but the yoke would work to support the lens for quick access to a stabile base. It also has a standard 1/4x20 thread that would accept a small ballhead. You could add an Arcs-Swiss mount for quick attachment. Link: https://a.co/d/2rDhGQ3 Another note: I have a lightweight monopod that extends to 5 feet or so and works fine as an impromptu walking stick. I wouldn't lean on it too hard, but as an assist for stability, it's just fine. Dave

Sunday was another cold one at the rink. It was also the only outing that involved photography during a busy week of work and projects. We got there just in time for the warm-up and had to leave a bit early to head up the hill for church and to provide a bit of auto repair for Pastor Dan’s aging Jeep Cherokee. The game was better than last week where Matthew’s team faced off against a perennially undefeated team and lost 6-0. That sounds bad, but the other team usually scores in the mid-teens, making the loss less painful. This week saw a more even match and it was a good game with a lot of back-and-forth action that ended with a 6-2 win and before we had to leave, we got to see Matthew score one of the six from his defenseman position about a mile away. Goooooooaaaaaaalll! Dave

Feel free to post anywhere. The only caveat I would add is that starting a separate topic might make your content more visible. Nice subject, BTW. Enjoyed it! Dave

Pictures taken between Monday, November 11 and Sunday, November 17. Any neighbors have their Christmas lights up yet? Post photos! Make them famous! Rules: See above That's it. This isn't a contest. All photos taken this week are welcome (not just cruising). Prizes will not be awarded. Discovering the joy of photography is the prize. The idea is to get folks out using their cameras for more than vacations and toddler birthdays. Post one. Post many. Up to you. Have fun with your camera and share your fun with others!

It was a solution for my personal cruise travel and one that will only be used to load a few images to share with the family while away. As I mentioned before, I have never had a card failure since I stick to the name brands from reputable distributors and regularly replace older cards that might had hit their TBW limit. Because of this, backing up images has fallen pretty far down the list of necessities. I also don't have volume issues caused by dual-format storage. I have been shooting JPEG only since about 2016 when the noise profile and JPEG engine in my cameras got good enough that I could no longer see any real benefit from RAW. Link to an article I wrote on my JPEG vs. RAW experiences: RAW vs. JPEG – The Family Photographer I don't shoot the same high volumes of images while on vacation as I do for the grandkids' ice sports. (I learned to shoot in the Analog Era where there was a film budget for vacation😉). On our trip to Europe this year, I ended up with about 1,500 images and I usually double that for an Alaska trip with burst shooting for whales and such. Capacity isn't really an issue since I can store 1,600 or so of the 60MP JPEGs from my main camera on an 80GB CFE-A card and it holds two of them. I also carry a couple of large SD cards just in case. Everybody has different storage and redundancy needs and will need different solutions to satisfy them. Ironically, after I wrote the original post, I remembered that I could connect directly to the camera with Wi-Fi or USB to transfer any files. Now I don't even need to pack a card reader. Dave

Well, I just saved the cost of a laptop. I got to thinking that my phone has a really fast processor and though not as new, my Pixel tablet was purchased primarily for its speed to replace my aging Kindle Fire. I plugged my card reader into the tablet, fiddled with the Files app (which I rarely use) and found it to be very easy to copy the card contents to a new "Travel Storage" folder on the tablet. Relatively fast too. It took about a minute to copy 36 JPEGs from my Type A card (1.7GB). With 180GB free on the tablet, I am all set! Browsing the images is way better on the tablet than on the camera's LCD. Dave

It was printed with a multicolor filament that transitions to a different color every few meters. 94 meters and 27 hours, Dave