A New Eye

A New Eye



Back in 2001 I bought my second camera, a Canon Powershot A20. I'm by no means a photographer and it was a great little camera, easy to use — although I didn't use it very often, as I said, I'm not a photographer. (Note: Only the first and last photos were taken with the Nikon. The rest simply illustrate how bad I was.)

Then in 2005 I decided that food blogs with photos were far superior to food blogs without so I decided that every article I posted here would have an accompanying photo. It was a struggle. I took some appallingly bad shots that probably did more to turn appetites off than on. But I stuck with it and got some excellent advice from several people, most notably my brother Kerry.

I also started really paying attention to other food photos and learning from them. I worked on setting the shot up, learned to do lighting, learned the camera's strengths and weaknesses, invested in a tripod, built a light box, and took lots and lots of pictures — as many as 50 a week for the next two years. And my photography inexorably improved. Until last summer. Last summer my images started drifting downhill.


At first I thought it was my imagination. That I had simply become more self-critical, and there was certainly an element of that. Or that I simply wasn't taking the care and making the effort I had before, but that wasn't it. I didn't think it was the camera. As we used to say in my programming days, bits don't rot. A digital camera's quality shouldn't deteriorate. It should either work perfectly or not. Period. But I finely came to the conclusion that the camera was deteriorating… and then, this past January, I realized that although the imaging was digital, the auto-focus mechanism was an analog servo-motor and it was wearing out. Doh!

By this time I was actually making money off of my photos. Directly in the case of articles for NPR and a few print publications, and indirectly in the case of Gather.com, Spot-on.com, and now About.com. I could certainly justify a new camera and it was clearly time to upgrade to a digital SLR.

I needed more control over depth of field to get those cool shots where the background fades away. I needed more control over focal point, I needed more control over white balance, in fact I needed more control over everything.

I did my research and settled on the Nikon D40. Again, I'm not a photographer, but the camera had quite a few positive reviews and Consumer Reports listed it as a Best Buy. It was also within my budget and my second choice (a Canon EOS) wasn't, so at the end of January I took the plunge and bought a refurbished D40 ($440).

Two months later I'm pleased as punch. The last time I was this happy with a purchase was when I bought my Toyota Camry — and that cost over $20k. Like it's predecessor, the Canon, it feels right in my hands. As a cook, and so someone who works with his hands, that tactile sense of confidence is important, reassuring, even though I rely on a tripod 99 percent of the time.

It's also relatively simple to use. If I wished I could treat it just like a point-and-shoot. But I've found that I can add in more sophisticated capabilities as I become ready to tackle them. Right off the bat I started using the ability to actually set the focus. This was something I'd long dreamed of and now I had the option. At first I just specified the kind of lighting I was using — fluorescent, daylight, incandescent — which determines the white balance in a photo. But now I'm directly setting the white balance.

The photos for About.com are proving to be a challenge because the maximum photo size in an article there is 200 x 200 pixels. I can provide larger photos but can't directly include them. So what I'm trying to do now is go in for really tight shots that offer enough detail at 200px and then pull back for a larger photo that works at 500px.
It's not all good. I knew my lighting system was weak, but that's even more apparent with this camera because it can pick up nuances the Canon couldn't. I like to set a delay on shots so I can take my hands off the camera before shooting (my current setup requires that I bend over, hunch down, and twist to shoot so keeping rock-steady even with a tripod is a problem), this camera requires I reset the delay for each shot. Fortunately it has a couple of macro buttons and I programmed one to set the delay so I don't have to go into the menus each time.

The menus could be better organized, it took me a while to figure out where to go for what, and the manual, as usual, is piss-poor. On the other hand the battery life is amazing, in two months I've only had to charge it three times while the Canon needed charging after every couple of sessions.

All in all, I couldn't be happier. And sometimes, when I pick the camera up from my desk to take back to my studio/guest room I note a smile flickering across my mouth as my hand closes around the device and I lift it. If you’re a cook, don't undervalue the feel of a camera, it matters as much as your favorite knife.

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