The Dude on the Right Has New Toys!

By:

The Dude on the Right

Sometimes I hate the internet, or maybe I can blame this blog thing I have
started, and this may be hard to explain, but let’s see if I can do it.

So the other night I got back to covering concerts and was slightly dismayed
at the fact that there I was in the dark ages, still using a camera that yes,
actually used film. All of the rest of the photographers had there nice digital
cameras, but not me. And still at that time, I thought unless I had a lot of
dough to invest, it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. You see, the issue was
that years ago, and I’m talking like 20 years ago, I invested in the
Minolta system. They
were one of the firsts with auto-focus ability, although in those days it was
almost just as easy to manually focus to get the shot. Then I kept graduating to
a better camera body, but my old Minolta lenses still worked. Then I graduated
to a better Minolta (the Maxxum 700si) and some nice lenses. Then the digital
age began, my first seeing it at
Farm Aid back in who knows
when. Still out of my price range, I was still okay with my 700si. Then, a
little before I stopped covering concerts, the digital age really started to
take hold, except I read that Minolta had no inkling of making a digital SLR
like Canon and Nikon were doing. I resigned to the fact that if I was ever going
to convert to digital, it was going to take a larger than I wanted to investment
and just let it go, and as I stopped covering concerts, it really didn’t seem to
matter, anyway. Not paying attention to camera gear, I just let it go.

Then, the other day, as I wrote my blog after the

Neil Diamond
concert, I clicked over to the Minolta site. I had known that
they combined with Konica, but low and behold, there, on the starting page, was
a link to a Minolta digital SLR. I knew, from that point, that I was ruined,
especially after being upstaged at my Neil Diamond shoot. So, after much
reading, I took the plunge and got my new Minolta 7D. Had I never started this
blog thing, I would have never gone to the Minolta site, but now I’ve got a
really cool new toy, hoping that when I shoot Green Day next week that I don’t
totally regret the move and should have just stuck with my trusty 700si.

And to top my list of too many things to play with, I downloaded some real
blog software from
Moveable Type
and am seeing if it will be easier and cooler to use it rather
than my older cut and paste editing of this page. It has the cool stuff like
being able to add comments and archiving and this, that, or the other thing. The
camera seems pretty cool, and the software is probably pretty simple to use if I
didn’t want the page to look at similar to this one, so we’ll see how things go.
So yea, great, I’ve got to learn how to use a kick-butt new camera and figure
out some new software, as well as finish some CD reviews, see "Dukes of Hazzard,"
and get a bunch of movie preview done. Such will be my weekend.

Have an unbelievable weekend.

That’s it for this one! I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!