![]() In all seriousness, as far as I’m concerned the 350D is as “new” a camera as I’m interested in, it’s almost verging on being too recent. Well, that’s what I told myself to justify buying yet another camera body. That was until about 3 weeks ago when, after 16 years, I decided it was time to give it another chance. I never missed it, I never looked back and wished I’d kept it. Burj Al Arab, Dubai 2006.Įventually, in 2008 I bought a 40D to replace it and I’m fairly sure I sold the 350D on ebay to recoup part of the outlay on a brand new body. It’s too small, too plasticky and awkward to grip for any length of time. One thing always nagged at me about the 350D, though, and that is the size. ![]() Anything really that I could do whilst walking about to get some much needed time to myself in relative peace. My preference for photography changed over that time and I became more interested in night photography, street and portraiture. I really, really, really wish I’d composed this with the sun and car on the left of the frame. During those years I learned so much in terms of technical knowledge, understanding how the basics work and trying to improve compositions. I took the 350D pretty much everywhere I went for the next two years and it recorded some of the most significant and memorable times of my life. Total crap in terms of build quality, but capable of producing some really nice images. What an upgrade it was, I think I learned more from that one single purchase than anything else. It didn’t take long before I started craving better equipment, but being on a student budget meant a 50mm F1.8 was as good as it was going to get. After months of learning to wait for the light, I finally got a half decent picture. In conclusion, I hadn’t a clue how to take a picture in a club environment and didn’t learn for months. I took thousands of images as I learned, found out the kit lens was horrible, tried to understand low light situations and discovered ISO 1600 was massively noisy. I knew absolutely nothing about how a camera worked back then, ISO, F stops, white balance, none of it meant anything to me.Īt the time I was watching a lot of live music and so decided that would be a great opportunity to take some amazing pictures with my new toy. I spent many, many hours and days lurking in online photography forums trying to learn how to use and control an SLR properly. Whatever that meant… My actual 350D kit in 2006… …a whole 1 day old and I had no idea how to use it I was now a serious photographer, this was going to solve all of my problems caused by only having a lowly compact Ixus 500 and more than that, I had access to RAW files. This was far too tempting to a young university student such as myself and just one year later in February of 2006, I spent the last of my student loan on a 350D – my first “real” camera. Suddenly, photography had become accessible to people on a whole range of incomes. ![]() Simultaneously, retailers began selling off their stock of 300D’s for bargain basement prices. On release the 350D was approximately £200 cheaper than the 300D had been and at around £600 you could pick up the kit which gave you everything you needed to get going, even though the 18-55mm kit lens was appalling. The 350D raised the bar yet again for what people could expect from an entry level camera, whilst simultaneously lowering the price to an even more affordable level. No longer was digital SLR photography the domain of professionals and those with deep pockets. Its predecessor, the 300D had changed the market and rate of adoption for “serious amateur” digital photography by offering a body that was capable, produced great results and above all was affordable to most who wanted one. Launched in February 2005, the Canon 350D marked another significant step forward in the rapidly evolving digital SLR landscape.
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