Taking pictures is a big part of my life. I have been doing it for as long as I can remember. There is a picture of me as a college student over fifty years ago with a Nikon F1 camera in my hand.
I have written several camera articles starting back in 2006 when I wrote about a Sony Pocket camera. The death of that Sony camera gave me my first experience with Panasonic cameras when I bought a Panasonic Lumix DMC ZS-1 as a replacement. Ten years later that camera is still working.
I have also used and written about Nikon and Canon's point and shoot super zoom cameras. I bought my Nikon P500 in 2012 and moved to a quicker focusing Canon SX50 in 2013. The Canon was a great camera but had to go in for repair regularly.
In 2017 I got a Panasonic Lumix Z1000 as a large sensor replacement for my aging Nikon DSLR D3100. In 2018 after three refurbished replacements to the Canon now an SX60 followed by another hardware failure, I moved to a Panasonic Lumix FZ80 for my everyday bird and beach camera. I have been a happy user for over a year. Along the way in 2016, I added a Lumix LX100 which I sometimes use as a pocket camera. Most often it gets used for inside shots especially of people. These are not particularly expensive cameras. You could buy all three of them for what it costs to buy one of Nikon's new 70-200mm zoom lens. The FZ80 is available on Amazon for under $300.
People regularly ask me which camera is my favorite? I often reply that my favorite camera is the one I have in my hand and sometimes that means my Google Pixel 2XL smartphone.
It is no surprise that cameras have a hard time surviving my environment. I take close to 100,000 pictures for some years. The cameras get exposed to a lot of sand, salt, and weather. I regularly wear out SD cards. I am happy to report that my two newest Lumix cameras have very reliable WiFi transfer modes.
More important than the cameras that I use is what I do with the photographs after I take them. On a typical morning, I will go for a walk and take anything from a dozen to fifty photos. When I return home, I will often do a WiFi transfer to my phone of four to ten pictures. Those pictures once they get to my phone, are automatically backed up to Google photos. I often use the online Google photo editing tools to resize and correct a few photos which I will post on Facebook.
When I go upstairs to my office, I will download all photos using Lightroom. From all of the photos I have downloaded for the day, I will pick the best ones, crop, and correct them in Lightroom. They are exported to a folder that is named with the day's date. That folder is on Microsoft's cloud service, One Drive. Sometimes, I will add to that folder from the ones I have stored on Google photos. Microsoft has very good tools that quickly allow you to resize photos that I download from Google. Once a month or so I will upload my favorite photos from the month to Flickr. I also create Google Photo albums when it makes sense.
I still believe that in most cases, you will get a better photo with a real camera especially if you are after birds. However, I have taken some remarkable photos with my Google Pixel 2XL but they would have a hard time competing with an image from the Lumix Z1000 with its 21.1 Megapixels and 1 Inch High Sensitivity Sensor.
However, the best way to take good photos is to take lots of them and learn how to work with them. Photos straight out of the camera rarely match the image that you were trying to capture. At least learn how to change the white balance on your camera. Just setting the white balance on your camera to minus 2.5 will allow you to take a picture of a bright moon in the night sky. Having a good camera with image stabilization will allow for some great bird pictures. Most of all storing your photos in the cloud will let you easily enjoy your memories.
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