"Honey, look what I bought you for Xmas!" or "There are digital pictures... and then there are digital pictures..."

I love to take pictures. It feels as if I can experience the things around me much more intensively when I take pictures of it. It is only then I discover details I would have overlooked otherwise. Even when I review a picture, months or years later, I can revive the feeling I had when I took it. And I love a good picture.

Since my 15 year old analog (that's right: using film!) Minolta reflex camera died ("Sorry sir, we don't repair cameras older than five years"), I have not had a decent camera. Most of the pictures on my blog are shot using a nine year old Fujipix digital camera, Tine's small Sony Cypershot, Lana's newer compact Nikon Coolpix P80 or my cellphone (recently upgraded to an iPhone).

But I lacked something of my own, where I could take real high quality pictures. With the help of my friends Diego and Scott, I finally made up my mind and bought a Nikon D90 (above) with a 22-200mm lens. I can tell you: after all these years, I had simply forgotten what a decent camera feels like, and what a serious quality picture looks like.

Like a small kid sitting by the Christmas tree, I opened up the boxes, put the lens on the camera, switched it on, zoomed at something randomly, pointed, focused and shot... My first picture with my new camera was a bottle on a table in an ill-lit room. I just pointed and shot with the built-in flash.

The picture looked like this (I converted the picture to low resolution for this blog):


It was not until I looked at the picture in the actual resolution that I saw the real detail, and the real quality. Look at the play of the light and colours on the bottle neck:


Look at the condense droplets inside the bottle (this is the actual resolution):


Here is the original picture (3 Mb, though!)...

So, in short.. expect more pictures on this blog ;-)

Picture camera courtesy Gear Patrol