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Well, I took a deep breath and bought a new camera - A Canon 400D. I used SLR 35mm cameras for many years, but when I went digital I could not afford a digital SLR but was frustrated by the two “point and shoots” I had even though these were fairly high up the range with manual controls and so on.

The new camera (with an additional telephoto zoom lens) cost a lot of money, but I love it already. There is something natural and instinctive about using an SLR - it was how I learnt photography and it still feels right.

Photos soon when I have had a chance to make some.

I am thinking very hard about buying a new camera sometime soon, while being aware that I am not always using my existing camera as well as I could. Whatever I eventually do about a new camera, the most important thing is to make more images, more often and of better quality.

To motivate me in this quest I have created a photoblog - “Thoughtful Camera” - which is live now. The idea is to make at least one image each week and publish them there. This will be a good discipline - it does not matter if anyone else likes them: though you are welcome to visit. Collections of images will still appear in the gallery from time to time.

The biggest reason for thinking about a new camera is frustration with the present one. My Nikon Coolpix 5700 is a good camera and can make great images, but it is not a SLR. It is slow to focus (and quite easy to fool) and it takes ages and great care to set it manually or semi-automatically to achieve the kind of image I want. By current standards, especially if I want big prints, 5 megapixels is limiting. The battery life is dire, even with the big battery pack and putting images onto the memory card is slow. I am looking in the direction of a Canon 400D, but the price means this is a big commitment and needs a careful decision.

By the way, the photoblog was created with pixelpost with my own template adapted from the default. Very simple and easy to use open source software (if you know anything about php and mysql web sites, that is!)

The image gallery is back. This time I am running Coppermine - seems much faster and easier to use than Gallery 2 was - much less code to install too.

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After a lot of messing around I have finally become fed up with gallery2 and killed it on this site. It is an impressive piece of software but has become far too complex for what I needed and maintaining it has become very difficult - honestly, it has become bloatware. I will reinstall a gallery when I can find one that is slick, small and does what I want.

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I have been using an Olympus C-3020z digital camera for years. Over the last eight or nine months it has been developing a problem where horizontal black lines would show across images and it would take a long time between pressing the button and taking a photo. Both these were due to problems with the connection to the rather flimsy memory cards. In the last month or two, this became even more severe and I had to keep taking the card in and out to get it to work at all. I also noticed a tendency for the images to have a magenta colour cast. Finally, it became too unreliable and irritating to use.

I took the plunge and bought a Nikon CP 5700 - I would have liked the Nikon D70 DSLR but simply cannot afford it - or the several lenses, flash gun, filters etc. I would feel obliged to buy to go with it. Internet research and talking to a few people suggested the 5700. It is being superceded so might be affordable if I shopped around. It has a fantastic lens, which does 35 - 280mm and you can add supplementary lenses to go even wider or longer. It has an electronic viewfinder, so like an SLR you do see what the lens sees. (The separate viewfinder on the Olympus was always a problem I found) It can do everything - with every kind of focus and exposure you can imagine. Most importantly, I looked at lots of sample images and for the sorts of photography I do its images were the most impressive in its price class.

I found one in Jessops in Milton Keynes, played for ten minutes, helped by a genuinely knowledgeable assistant, who showed me the new (better but more costly) version and confirmed that these were on their way out. I decided that the price had dropped a great deal (only 30% of when the camera was newly on the market!) and was not likely to drop much more and after an agonising moment of financial decision making, I took the plunge.

I have not done much yet except to find my way around it, but I love it. It feels professional and takes stunningly high quality shots. The viewfinder has all the information I need and the camera seems to be intuitive to use (something I have often heard said about Nikons). Most of all, it makes me want to take photos. I have posted a few of my first shots in the gallery - these are hugely reduced in size, but give a hint of the quality of the images this camera produces.