Doug Greenberg's photostream  

I have been taking photos since roughly 1966, so I've seen a fair amount of evolution (dare I say progress?) in photo technology over the years. I remember my very first SLR camera, a Mamiya/Sekor with an external light metering system. I tried, vainly to get closeup bird photos with a cheap Steinheil 200mm. lens, and later graduated to a stop-down Schneider 360mm. tele. Ah, those were the days!

I have stuck with Nikon equipment since 1968. Now that Nikon is selling VR versions of the supertelephoto lenses I can stop musing about possibly switching to Canon :).

For now, I am content to use my D300 DSLR with a fun variety of older lenses. In the past few years I have acquired, amazingly cheaply, Nikon 500mm. f4P and 600mm. f5.6 superteles. These are manual focus lenses, but frankly, I have lived most of my life without relying on autofocus, and I consider AF to be a luxury, not a necessity, even for bird photography. Sour grapes? Perhaps!

For family photos and such, I use shorter lenses, of course, including the excellent Nikon 18-200mm. VR zoom. I also have a few tiny digicams, one of which I almost always carry in a pocket wherever I go, just in case that unexpected shot beckons at a moment's notice. And I recently acquired a Coolpix 7100, a point and shoot camera for "serious" photographers, i.e., the image quality is excellent and there is lots of manual control.

I'm forever trying to learn how to use Photoshop properly, after using the old trial and error approach for several years. Sometimes I struggle, and wonder whether an old dog indeed can learn new tricks. I'll keep trying.

I confess that part of what I enjoy is the;playing with toys aspect of photography, i.e.,over the years I have a bunch of old lenses, tripods, cameras, etc., and I like to fool around with them. I love trying to coax good photos out of cheap equipment even in cases where I own something that is by most measures more elaborate.

Finally: I'm very pleased that my older son Robert has caught the bug and is now taking very fine photos using, in part, some gear that I've handed down to him. His user name here in Flickr is Rambaral; check out his photos!