The camera I use, a Panasonic DMC-FZ200, must now be over ten years old and has taken thousands of pictures in environments from the heat and humidity of Tanzania to the chill of Alaska.
To be honest, if it stopped working tomorrow I would probably go out and buy the same machine again, though it does, for my needs, have some limitations. The worst is evident in this picture, where a couple of days ago I was trying to capture the first greenfinch I'd seen at our new house - and the camera simply wouldn't quite focus on it, preferring to focus on the twigs. The camera does have a manual focus feature but it's very clumsy. The only way of getting round this is to have a bridge camera like mine but with a manual focus - and I don't think such a machine exists.
The joy of the camera is that it's almost totally automatic. I know nothing about exposure settings so it does them for me, and it also focuses automatically, though I have various tricks to help me choose my focus. It takes a burst of about 12 pictures per second - used for example when I had only moments to catch these geese as the flew south.... yes, south.... past the house yesterday morning.
The great thing about a bridge camera is that it takes a wide range of types of picture, and can be adjusted to whatever setting I want extremely quickly - as is exemplified by this shot, taken the day before yesterday when I saw a bird, which I suspected was a red kite, soaring near a passenger jet contrail, and even more so when, walking home from the village this morning through the woods I had seconds in which to 'shoot'....
The camera has become almost an extension to my body, fitting in to my hand and bouncing happily in its case against my hips - and I can draw it faster then Roy Rogers pulled a six-gun. I seems to me to be a perfect example of a machine making easily accessible to amateurs like me a great deal of very complicated technology.
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