One downside to visiting Farnborough yesterday was the expected terminal case of camera envy. Everywhere you looked there were people carrying great big Canon and Nikon DSLRs or even the Olympus and Sony ones. Some of them had the bloody great paparazzi-style lenses. I knew it would make me feel bad about my little compact model. Compared to some of the kit being used there I might as well have been taking snaps on a mobile phone.
I know that it is not all down to the equipment: there is skill and talent involved as well. The trouble is that I am also lacking in skill and talent, but having a small camera with limited zoom capabilities does not help. Every time I took a picture that looked like this:
I knew that a bloke next to me with a 40cm long lens attachment would be taking something like this, or even better:
We went on a walking weekend last year with a group of friends who were much better equipped photographers than us. Some of their photos were better (although the very best picture of the water vole we came across was taken by one couple’s 12 year old son with my point and shoot) but it did make the walking a lot slower than it could have been. A phallic looking lens is probably best for an airshow but its really hard to get a sneaky snap of a squirrel….
Not sure about the logic in that. Surely a big pap-style lens would let you take close-ups of animals without having to actually get close enough to disturb them.
Don’t all the proper wildlife photographers have great big ones? (Oo-er)
Having spent a long, long time looking for pictures of the Red Arrows earlier this year, I can assure you the above are pretty rare 🙂 Hand-held 400mm lenses look swish, but would be useless for the second kind of shot without a lot of practice – the planes just move too fast across the frame.
Plus, most of the interesting RA shots come from the contrail patterns imho, so a compact is just as good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Still won’t stop me drooling with envy over your 400D 😉
Agree about the smoke patterns though. (Does it count as a contrail if its from smoke canisters?) Makes me think I should have used photos of the Vulcan to make my point better. I have quite a few tiny-dots-in the-middle snaps and have seen some spectacular shots from other people on Flickr.