So after seeing a post on FB about a parent looking to buy their child an inexpensive camera (Budget £500, or approximately $650 at the time of writing) and watching a 2018 video from Peter McKinnon about whether or not a professional photographer could tell the difference between pictures taken with a $400 camera vs a $4,000 camera, I decided it was time to share a story.
In late 2019 I purchased the NinjaBaby (or NinjaPotato as he likes to be referred to [more on that later]) a 5.0MP Sony “Point and Shoot” camera for his birthday.
Some of the long time readers of this blog may remember back to 2018 when I did my “Thankyou Sony” post about when I let the NinjaPotato snap some pics with my Sony A3000 (ILCE-3000) and he come up with this shot of me blowing bubbles.
That was a great day, and I had fun with it, but I really wanted something where at his current age (6) he would be able to carry around (when appropriate, like on our Disney Trip) and take pictures at his whim, and the results were impressive.
Now many of you will likely notice, that I did run all the JPG files through Adobe Lightroom Classic, and did basic Cropping and Photo editing, but honestly it was nothing more than I do with much of my own photography.
I can say Disney World was definitely the place to introduce him to taking his own set of pictures, because he drew much attention from the PhotoPass Photographers and the Photo Supervisors which lead to some “extra benefits” we will cover in a future blog. But sufficed to say, everyone that every cast member who saw him in his Lion King dance costumer, and his point and shoot camera, wanted to know him. Some of the photographers even stood in line with him and taught him how to preview his pictures on his camera so that he could show them off.
One downside I will mention about the older Sony Point and Shoot is that it takes AA (Double A) batteries, and won’t power on the cheap ones. If you put in some Kodak AA’s bought on the cheap at the grocery store, or Sunbeam cells from DollarTree, you will be disappointed. We had an issue where the camera would power up long enough to extend the lens, but wouldn’t have enough power to retract it before powering back down. We used Energizer Lithium and Duracell Ultra which worked very well, and lasted our entire trip. However we would swap them back and forth because after a bit of use they would stop working well, we would swap to another set after it had rested and they would be fine again for a while, and we just kept doing that back and forth between the Duracell and Energizer Batteries.
But back to the blog at hand, I guess what I’m trying to show with this post is that if you HAVE a camera, and you HAVE a passion, just use what you got. Don’t go chasing rainbows, or the latest and greatest “buzz words”. Enjoy what you have, and what you can manage, till it’s no longer fun, then sit back, take a look, and decide if you want to go further, or take a longer break.
-R
P.S. The first image of this blog (the featured image) was also taken on the NinjaPotato’s DSC-W5, however it was taken by one of the PhotoPass Photographers.
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