The journey continues.

Most of you know that I’m an avid videographer and indie film maker. Well, this past month I’ve decided to step up my game when it comes to digital photography.

We have a Nikon D40 DSLR that we purchased about 6-7 years ago and it’s been (and still is) a great camera for me to learn digital photography. Back in Sept of 2010 I attended a Photoshop seminar and sat in on some digital photography classes and I was hooked. I even bought a pair of strobes to test out my portrait sessions of my family and my son. I’ve also tried to get better at sports photography. A good friend of mine (John Boggess) let me borrow his Canon with some great lenses to shoot a volleyball game.

That convinced me to purchase a large Sigma 70-200mm F2.8 lens to shoot my daughters basketball game but soon I found that our D40 just couldn’t handle some of the demanding requirements of shooting sports indoors.

So after tons of research and recommendations from another friend (Jim Gonzalez), I decided to step up my game and purchase a Nikon D7000 with some other lenses.

A Sigma 20-70mm F2.8 to complement the Sigma 70-200mm lens I already had and a Prime 50mm F1.8 Nikkor lens for some great depth of field shots.

See pictures below which I took with my DIY lightbox — click on them for a larger view:

The D7000 is quite bigger and heavier than our current D40 but has tons of features that will “hopefully” help me become a better photographer. I’ve been scouring the web for information on the camera, podcasts, tutorials and tips.

Here are some sample shots straight out of the camera – no retouching. The bottom photos were of a photo shoot I helped out my buddies a couple of weeks ago. We have more photos but my job that night was to assist Fernando in the video department, thank goodness the third member of our team, Mike show up. He took lots of pictures using his camera but one of my lenses. See photos below — click on them for a larger view:

Speaking of video — the D7000 does something I’ve been wanting to try out as well. HD video.

This puppy shoots at 1080p and I’m excited to try that out with my lenses. It won’t mean I’ll get rid of my Panasonic DVX100B because my Panasonic is really great to carry around during games but it only shoots in SD, Standard Definition and since a-lot of folks are now moving to HD TVs (me included) I need to start thinking of HD as a medium for me to embrace.

Purchasing the Nikon D7000 gives me the best of both worlds so I’m excited to start this new journey and maybe help pay some of our bills.

Plus…I get to start building new DIY rigs for my DSLR when used as a digital video camera. 🙂

I’ll keep posting on my progress.

Beto


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