I’ve been a Canon user my entire life. My first 35mm camera was a Canon. My first digital P&S was a Canon. My first SLR was a Canon. My first Digital SLR was a Canon. My next 3 or 4 DSLRs were also all Canons. Now, after all these years of using Canon, I have an announcement to make: I am switching to Nikon. This doesn’t mean that Canon is no good or that I will never buy a Canon camera again, but for the foreseeable future, I will be a Nikon user. I learned on a Canon 20D for most of my college career and that was a fantastic camera for the job and I learned tons of things about photography with that. Now is the time to make sure that I am using the best camera for the job, however.

When I joined the ship, one of the first questions my manager asked me was, “What camera are you using?” When I said, “Canon”, you could just see the disappointment. From then on the joke around the lab was always “buy Nikon” whenever there was any issues with images that I took, as if buying a Nikon would magically make my photographs perfect. Well obviously that isn’t the case, but I do believe that in this particular job, and Nikon is simply better. The D300 in particular is a good choice. I went ahead and spent a couple hundred bucks more and bought a D300s. It’s basically the same thing except that I get to use both SD and CF cards, I can take video, and I can shoot at 7fps instead of 6. It’s well worth spending $200 more.

So while Nikon isn’t magic and doesn’t make any photograph perfect, it does seem to do a better job at color rendition and overall handling. I used my manager’s D300 for a formal night and the photos that it produced right out of the camera were much better and required much less editing on the computer before printing than my Canon cameras. In a job where you’re printing around 8,000 photos a week, it’s nice to have the photos as close to perfect as possible so you don’t have to spend a lot of time editing.

In other news, I was promoted to assistant manager on Monday! Joanne, who is in charge of the S and R class ships came to visit us and gave me this promotion. Tino is the manager on this ship and he and his wife are leaving on the 21st, so I will be taking over the assistant manager position when they leave. We will be getting a new manager. I couldn’t have asked for a better person than Tino to train me, so I’m super thankful to have had him around. Five months from joining the company to assistant manager is apparently the fastest that anyone has ever done it. Oh yeah.

It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to get on the ferries for my next contract, but I am still planning on getting on a ship in Europe if the people in my company will allow me to do that. It would still be a ship with Holland America and I have my eye particularly on the Eurodam, so we’ll see what happens.