review of some compact cameras, when talking of gifts calculated to make the family shutterbug happy, I mentioned the newly-launched Canon 60D and Nikon D7000.
Those two sound like great cameras and aimed at squarely at enthusiasts, with price tags to match, but there are still very good buys to be made for a lot less money.
Still very capable, are the Nikon D 3100 and Canon 500D models which are often available around town in bundles, which offer great value. You’ll often get the camera, a bag, a memory card and a second lens for between R7000 and R8000.
Point-and-shoot cameras are also popular gifts with happy snappers and professionals alike, because they are relatively compact and, although they don’t offer quite the same image quality as a DSLR does, they will produce pretty good pictures.
The number of compact is available is so huge and they are updated so frequently that it is pretty much impossible for anyone to keep track of them. The trick here is to pick a well-known brand and buy the best model you can afford.
I do not have a compact myself but I have been hankering after Canon’s new G12, released a couple of months ago. I have also heard good things about the Panasonic cameras and slightly less good things about Nikon, although their latest P 7000 looks very promising.
Blogger Thom Hogan has just completed a review of some compact cameras on his bythom.com blog, and this may help in choosing one. I’ll include a link to the review page on my blog, address at the end of this article.
I mentioned Amazon earlier and they will also be the source of the next gift on my list, which is a recently-released CD which covers the early recordings of Elvis Presley at Sun Studio.
Elvis: Rockabilly Years’>Rockabilly Years: Just About As Good As It Gets, at £7.99, includes all the material recorded by Elvis at the legendary studio and, as a bonus, there are a couple of tracks recorded during the Million Dollar Quartet jam session when Elvis played along with Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash.
I’ve been getting into early rock ‘n’ roll and rockabilly and Amazon has an extremely good selection of music and books. I recently bought A Rocket In My Pocket: The A Rocket in My Pocket: The Hipster’s Guide to Rockabilly Music">Hipsters Guide to Rockabilly, by Max Décharné.
It covers the origins of rockabilly including a substantial section on Sam Phillips, the studio owner who gave Elvis his break, and his Sun Studio. There is a companion soundtrack CD’>companion soundtrack CD to the book, and I got that too.
Talking about music, and not just rock ‘n’ roll, buying music online is the new big thing and, although Apple’s iTunes music store is not available to South Africans, Nokia’s Ovi store is.
I have bought some music from it and have found that the selection is great and the pricing quite reasonable. You do get unlimited music downloads included with some Nokia phones but I prefer to pay for the music I want because I can then play it on any device that I wish to.
The bonus is that the system keeps a list of the tracks you buy and, should these ever be lost, you can sign in to the store and go to the account section, where you can download them again.
While looking around at the South African online store, Kalahari.net, I found what for me must be the most unlikely gift of all. It is a Harley-Davidson pen and goes for a staggering R1995 although, at the price of the bikes themselves, that is a mere bagatelle.