This week, I’m on vacation in Arizona soaking up the sights in the desert and the mountains.  Of course, that means I’ll have to take the obligatory vacation photos, and so that brings up the topic of cameras.  What kind should I use?  How to make some of this stuff look the most interesting?  And what happens if I can’t get a good shot of something very interesting due to overexposure?

My camera history has ranged from pretty awful to pretty great.  When I was a kid, I got a Kodak 110-film camera, with fixed focus.  It didn’t work very well, but it was cheap, so it was good for a kid.  Finally I bit the bullet and got an Olympus 35mm film camera.  It had autofocus but no zoom, but it took decent pictures.  However, it didn’t have many control options, and the viewfinder didn’t quite give an accurate view of what picture I was taking.  I used it until I got a used 35mm SLR for a photography class in high school, which gave me plenty of control and a decent idea of how my picture would look, but still didn’t have optical zoom.  I finally entered the digital world with a Sony DSC-P41.  I now had all the advantages of digital, although it still didn’t have optical zoom – so I upgraded to an HP PhotoSmart M407, which had 3x optical zoom.  Both of the cameras were four megapixels.

However, all was not well in the world of my photographs.  My main problem was low-light photography – it seemed like every time I took a picture inside or at night, even if it looked okay on the camera LCD, it came out blurry.  This was somewhat of a problem with my Sony, but when I got my HP it became even worse. I also ended up having to edit most of my photos to get them to have the proper color cast and contrast.  And finally, I didn’t get anywhere near the amount of control that I got with my Nikon 35mm SLR.

Because I really wanted good low-light performance and more control over my images, I picked up a Konica Minolta Maxxum 5D digital SLR.  It has standard DSLR features such as 6MP photos, a very large CCD for good low-light performance, and a RAW photo mode.  The reason I chose it over other digital SLRs was a combination of low price and the fact that it offers optical image stabilization.

I at first used it to take photos like shots for eBay auctions.  It was very good at that.  But now that I’m on vacation and taking pictures, I’m trying to get better composition, which is really dependent on what I have around the landscapes to make them interesting.  More importantly, I’m finding out that even a good camera like mine can’t handle high contrast situations with a large range of light intensities.  I end up still having to bring up Photoshop when I download the photos to my computer to fix contrast and color issues.

I guess the moral of this story is that even great equipment can’t make up for some situations – there are times when even the best equipment is still limited by its optical abilities and the light-sensing properties of the film or CCD.  It’s just the nature of camera design that sometimes it’s impossible to make a shot look good.  It’s a shame that interesting shots have to be left untaken because of technical limitations – but I guess that’s technology for you.