In Part 2 I will talk about my conversion to digital for still photography.
Through out all this time I still had my film Nikon F3‘s even though a lot of others had moved on to autofocus cameras. I shot slides instead of prints and loved my beloved Kodachrome. I loved my Nikons and had used them for over 30 years. As you can see I used the “professional big boys of the business, Sony, Nikon” when it was the best for me. They might had not been the most cost efficient but did turn out to be frugal because of the way I used them.
In 2001 I sold my beloved Nikons for this new thing called a digital still camera. I had already converted to digital with video and was taking stills from my VX1000 video camera. I bought a Sony F707 consumer camera with built in lens instead of a SLR because they were still $3,000. It had a low resolution electronic viewfinder. I really liked the smallness of the camera and instant feedback that digital gave me.
When the Canon Digital Rebel came out, I got a DSLR. At the time I could not afford “L-Glass”, so I had consumer lenses because still photography was secondary to video. A few years later when going on a vacation trip I need a second still camera so I bought at Costco an Olympus E300. I was immediately impressed with the quality of the lenses and the camera. The jpegs out of the camera looked the best in terms of color quality compared to using any other camera. I was used to shooting slides so I like shooting jpeg and mostly do. I also had an Olympus E1 and then an Olympus E3 and was very happy. I truly loved the swivel LCD on the E3.
The Redrock M2 35mm lens adapter came out and I put it on my Sony V1 HDV video camera to get that elusive “35mm lens look.” The Sony had 1/4 inch chips. Tons of depth of field. The Redrock solved that problem. I already had some Olympus OM lenses that I had bought for my Olympus E series of cameras because I could use them with an adapter. Most people had a Nikon mount on their Redrock, I had an OM mount on mine.