The classic question - what camera should I buy? I have been pondering this one, and waffling back and forth between a couple of choices.
I have been interested in photography for a quite some time - long enough to be measured in decades - and so I of course learned using film. The first camera that I remember as being mine was a Polaroid. It was great. You put in these big cartridges (I also vaguely remember linear flash bulbs but that could have been another camera) and took the shot, and you could have the photo within minutes! For a kid, that was much more satisfying than taking film in to the store be developed, which took several days at the very least. However, it must be said that going to the store to pick them up was always fun. I distinctly remember going with my mom to two different camera stores to pick up the developed photos. I liked seeing the photos and I also liked looking around at the different camera equipment... dinosaurs by today's standards. There were stands and lights and cameras and lenses and chemicals and paper and ever-so-much-more.
Flash forward a few years and I remember receiving my grandfather's Pentax Spotmatic 35mm SLR with a few lenses. I still have it. It changed the way I thought about photography because I needed to think about how to take the picture... not just fire away. I came to learn about film ISO,and slide film versus negatives. I learned about F-stops and shutter speeds, and came to understand light and depth-of-field. Jump ahead a few more years, and my aunt gave me her Canon EOS Elan II along with a few lenses. I still have that, too. That camera took me from the world of fully manual into the world of auto focus. The camera automatically did many of the things that were essential using the Pentax. Both of them were (and still are) wonderful cameras.
Then things changed. My life got busier and I stopped taking pictures as often as I had before. And cameras went digital. Of course, many people (or, at least, I assume many people) have discussed how digital cameras changed photography. For me, it did two things. First, it was discouraging from my point of view because 1) film certainly resulted in better image quality than the early digital cameras, and 2) there was no way I could afford a digital camera. They were astronomically expensive. The second thing it did to me, once I was able to use digital cameras during graduate school, was make me photographically lazy. I could point-and-shoot away at will without having to think about much about how to set up the camera, and there were few consequences to taking bad photos or experimenting with shots that just shouldn't (and didn't) work. But, without the costs of film and printing, who cares? Don't like it - delete it.
A few years ago, my interests in photography were renewed (the subject of some future post). The family received a point-and shoot digital camera (Canon PowerShot A590) as a gift (largely to document a vacation), and I started getting more serious about taking good pictures again. I still am generally lazy and/or try taking crazy photos that the camera just doesn't have the capability to do and I have no business trying, but I try anyway. This has also been a great camera and I have taken many, many thousands of pictures with it. But, the quality of the images is not quite what it used to be; I don't think the camera ever fully recovered from a trip to an oppressively hot and humid location a year ago. Water / humidity and electronics just don't play well together. Additionally, I feel like I have 'run out of camera' in the sense that I am trying to push the camera beyond what it is able to do. So, now it is time for a new camera; a DSLR. So, again I ask myself, what camera should I buy? The main contenders: Canon vs. Nikon.
More on that next time.
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