Martin (talkytoaster)'s photostream  

I'm a 40 something guy who likes photography, geocaching, hiking and the great outdoors and nature...amongst other things.

My main camera is a Sony Alpha 300



I'm from Foggy Old England (Sussex, South of England to be precise). It isn't as wet or foggy there as much as you might think ;-)

My interest in photography started when I was a child using roll film, then 110 and 35mm (that's when I got my first SLR). I've used many SLRs along the way, mainly Zenit (manual everything) to Minolta AF and non-AF SLRs. The last one I had was a Minolta Dynax 5000 with the A/S card. This died about 6 years ago.

In-between I used Olympus and Vivitar compact point-and-shoot digitals. Not the same, although the Olympus is pretty good.

Finally made the jump to a Digital SLR in May 2009 and I'm loving the freedom it gives me to take pictures.

My favourite subjects are mainly flowers and bugs, but I love the countryside so will take pictures of landscapes and non-macro things too; animals and birds. I also travel a bit so like to capture a flavour of where I've been to remind me.

I have a Sony Alpha 300 with the 18-70 kit lens (all photos taken with it are tagged sal1870), a Vivitar 70-210 lens (all photos taken with it are tagged vivitar70210) and an old Minolta 35-80 lens too. None of these are proper macro lenses, maybe one day...

The Sony A300 with 18-70 kit lens cost me under £300 (new).

I've just purchased a Sigma 70-300 DG APO 4-5.6 lens, which seems to be a good lens, although a bit soft at the long end. All photos taken with are tagged sigma70300apodg. This has 1:2 macro functionality at a minimum focus distance of 95cm.

This lens cost me under £180 (new).

I've also recently been using new compact digital cameras, and the latest is a Canon Powershot A490 which has an excellent macro function.

Finally I've been dabbling with Black & White, tints and other filters and playing with my images.