Navigating Your Way Through Camera Reviews

I recently had to buy a new camera. It was a spur of the moment thing but for all the right reasons. I'll explain. I'd been asked to write about a music festival that was about to take place for a magazine. I duly submitted my 1200 word piece and thought nothing of it. I'd done lots of preview pieces for lots of different events and usually they don't lead to anything else.

So it was to my surprise that I got a phone call shortly afterwards asking me if I was interested in covering the festival in its entirety. Of course I agreed but there was one catch; I had to take plenty of pictures of the acts to accompany my writing. At the time it didn't seem like much of a catch, how hard could it be I thought? Take a few pictures while enjoying the music, easy.

So I agreed to everything, not really considering what it involved and dug out my camera. Now I haven't used my camera for quite a long time, years in fact. The only pictures I've taken in the last few years have been on my phone which has a pretty impressive built in camera. It wasn't until I found my old 35mm compact camera that I realized how far behind the times I was. I reckon the camera was 10 years old and it showed.

It was at least four times bigger than most other cameras I'd seen people using recently and still took 35mm roll film. Most people I knew had joined the digital revolution some time ago and were now using digital cameras. I considered my position. I'd be at a music festival seeing in excess of fifty bands over the course of three days.

A roll of 36 photos for each act, that would be 50 films and 1800 pictures. Aside from the fact that it would be a lot of film to carry around I realized the processing costs afterwards would probably take up all the money I was being paid to do the job and more besides. Maybe I needed to get a new camera.

I went out and bought several magazines on cameras and gadgets and technology and poured over the camera reviews for days looking for something that would do the job. What I found while reading all the camera reviews was that lots of it was repeated and lots of it was irrelevant. It's easy to get bogged down in the detail of something like a digital camera and it wasn't long before my head was spinning and I didn't know which way to turn. Camera reviews, I decided, were not good for me.

So I decided to put them aside for the time being and draw up a list of all the features I needed. I had an idea from the camera reviews of what was on offer I just needed to decide what was relevant. I made a few phone calls to friends, one of which was a photographer, and came up with three things that I need to include.

Lens - I needed to have two different types of lens, something to shoot close up; 28mm-50mm, and something to shoot from a distance; 200mm-300mm. As I wasn't sure what sort of settings the stages would be in so I needed to cover all possibilities. Two lenses should do it I thought.

Capacity - I needed magazine quality images and I needed lots of them so I needed a memory card in the camera that could deal with this. 8GB I decided would be enough, certainly no less.

Flash - Flash wasn't completely necessary; I'd been told by my photographer friend that many live events don't permit flash photography but if I could get a camera that had a built in flash it could prove useful.

So with my list in hand I went back to the camera reviews and in no time I was able to pick out two that ticked all the boxes. I went for the cheaper one; now all I had to do was learn how to use it!

Dominic Donaldson is an expert in the technology industry.
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