1.) Im so excited, just won a Minolta X-700 off of Ebay along with flash, bag, cable release, 28mm Macro, and standard 50mm. All for $75, everything is said to be in great condition too. Anyone have one of these babies? Looks to be a great camera. Has 3 modes: Automatic (chooses aperature and shutter speed), aperature priority and manual. I love Film Manual SLR's! They give so much control and flexibility. I plan on purchasing a nice 70-210 or 70-300 zoom lense for it (there on EBay for like $50!!!)
I belong to a Minolta Forum (mostly about the DSLR), but people on there swear by their X-700s. Many of the people with big collections of Minolta's newest still keep their 700s and use them as well.
There are a lot of good lenses for this camera available. One place you should check out is KEH.com. They are very reputable and their stuff is in better shape than they advertise. You could certainly pick up a nice zoom there for prices similar to ebay, without the worry about getting scammed.
You should also check out lens reviews for the 70-200/300s. Try pcphotoreview.com and photodo.com for starters.
2.) Anyways to the point: Do any of you guys belong to an online photo thing? You know one of those things like here where you get an account, upload photos and get critiqued an stuff? Any of you belong to a good one thats FREE (other than this forum ) Please refer me to a good one either by E-mail or posting right here. Thanks!
There are plenty of good free servers (KS photo forum is a pretty good one) for hosting. Then you can post your photos on some of the photo review pages (this one here is a pretty good one). I also like Outdooreyes.com.
The trick to getting good constructive criticism is to ask very honest questions like "How could I improve this shot?". When you post with lines like "Any comments", people respond with unhelpful replies like "nice" or "what camera/lens?".
The most important thing is to take lots of pictures, read a good nature/macro photography book (John Shaw's "Closeups in Nature" is my favorite) and be your own harshest critic.
Figure out what you don't like about your shots and figure out what you have to do to fix the problem. When you see someone else's shot you like, figure out why/how they captured it and emulate those skills. Or, when you see someone's shot that you don't like, figure out what they did wrong.
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Chris Harrison
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