A small selection of some of my recent favourite dog photos can be seen below :-

Death Valley, California – location for some of the scenes from Star Wars for the movie buffs out there. Although it looks cold, it was actually 50 C!

Yosemite – the most gorgeous place on earth (in my opinion!)

Highway 1 towards Big Sur, heading south from San Francisco.

Sand dunes in Death Valley, California.

Muscle Beach, California

Muscle Beach, California (again)

The Mustang I used on the trip!

Winding country road in Utah.

Monument Valley, in Utah, home of the Navajo Indian Reservation – the location of many of John Wayne’s movies. The photograph below is actually a panoramic combination of 6 shots.

Monument Valley as seen through my car mirror!

Half Moon, Yosemite National Park, back in California.

Half Moon again, but in colour. I couldn’t decide which I preferred, so I posted both of them!

Yosemite, El Capitan, which rockets over 7500 ft from the ground.

…and a final shot of Yosemite. My dream is to retire out in California; until then, I can dream in Doncaster!

You only have to look in any of the numerous photography publications out there, to see that the choice can often be bewildering to the first time buyer. Compact, bridge Camera or SLR? Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Olympus, Panasonic or Sony? 8MP or 30MP? I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Neither bridge cameras or high end compacts can match the SLR in terms of flexibility and image quality. For a wedding or portrait photographer, quality should be the be all and end all.

I’ll try and tackle the mega-pixel question first. It’s believed by many, that the higher the mega-pixel, the better the camera.  If you pop into your local electrical store and ask them which camera they recommend, more likely than not, they’ll try and sell you what ever they have on offer/a camera that’s about to be discontinued/ or one that they have too many left in stock and can’t shift. Although there are exceptions, you will probably know as much about photography as they do! Mega-pixels are, in my opinion, the last thing that you should be considering. My 6 year old Nikon D70 SLR only has 6mp, but the quality of the images that it produces still knocks the socks off of any 14+MP compact. I havent used it in over 4 years, but I’d turn to that rather than a 2010 high end compact every time, if the need ever arose. It all comes down to the quality of the glass on the front of the camera which captures the image.

This brings me onto probably the best bargain that anybody interested in progressing their photography should invest in – the humble 50mm prime  lens. If you go down the SLR route, this should be your first port of call. It will blow the socks off the kit lens that comes with the camera. The f1.8 lens will set you back around £100. Until the pound began it’s never ending downward spiral, you could have bagged one for around £65. £100, however, still represents a bargain in my eyes.  Faster  1.4 and f 1.2 pro- level variants are also available , however, these cost considerably more. The 50mm doubles up as fantastic portrait lens along with being a great everyday lenses.

The greatest thing about this lens is that f/1.8 (or better still, f1.4 if your budget allows). That super-low number means two things that are important in a practical way:

1) You have a very shallow Depth of Field (DOF), which means that your subject will be in sharp focus and everything else will be deliciously out of focus.
2) You can shoot in very low light conditions without a flash, giving your photos a very natural look.

My Nikon prime lenses, the 35 1.4 50mm 1.4 and 85mm 1.4 are 3 pieces of glass that i couldn’t live without (or at least make a living without!)

Using a zoom lens is great, however, they can sometimes make a photographer lazy – a prime lens, on the other hand, makes you think more about your composition. Traditionally, prime lenses have  been optically superior to zoom lenses. They are also lighter to walk around with, and due to their wide mazimum apertures, allow  in far more light which allows you to carry on shooting without resorting to flash – well after zoom lens have given up the ghost.