I'm Robin from Buffalo.
In 2000 I bought my first digital camera, a Polaroid Digital 320. My husband and I bought it on a lark at the Toronto airport for my birthday present. It cost C $80 as I recall. We were flying out to Calgary with two kids for a two week vacation. The kids each had some some kind of Vivitar 36 mm point and shoot film cameras while the adults' serious camera was my husband's Olympus XA 35mm film camera, which he had bought way back in 1982. The Polaroid 320 was really nothing more than a toy camera---it's resolution is 320x240 or 76K pixels. But it was still a lot of fun to download the pics onto my husband's PC each night and fiddle with the camera's software to "improve" those very primitive pictures while we were accumulating lots of rolls of film to develop once we got back home.
In 2001 I bought my first real digital camera was an an Olympus Camedia C-3000 Zoom. It was bought to replace the Olympus XA which developed some serious problems during and after that trip to Alberta and was no longer taking the high quality pictures we were used to getting out of it. At the time I wanted four things:
- A viewfinder rather than just an LCD screen on the back. I didn't particularly want or need the viewfinder to be a through the lens one, however. Just something similar to the Olympus XA's was fine.
- An aperture priority mode since that was what we were used to with the XA: You set the aperture manually, focused the camera manually, and it figured out the exposure.
- Auto focus. I was not as good as my husband was at manually focusing the XA.
- Enough pixels to make decent quality 4x6 inch prints of good pictures.
I paid a lot more for the Camedia than I meant to, all because I really wanted a way to control the aperture. I really enjoyed that camera and got some really nice pictures (as well as some really awful ones) out of it. However, the shutter lag was horrible.
I bought my first DSLR, a Pentax 100D, way back in July 2007. I was replacing Camedia because it was time to let my daughter take it off to Turkey on an AFS-exchange year when she was a high school senior. When I was camera shopping I didn't intend to get a DSLR and I didn't intend to get a Pentax. But---every single "advanced point and shoot" that had similar features as the Camedia also had no viewfinder---they'd all gone with just Live View on the back LCD, and while my Camedia had that feature, I seldom used it because I just couldn't hold the camera still enough at a comfortable distance for viewing the screen. (Middle-aged eyes don't help that problem.) And so I was "forced" to start looking at entry level DSLRs. The Pentax 100D won based on price and its shake reduction.
I've recently bought a used K-3 to (slightly) update my camera. I looked at the current K-70, which would have been in my budget and "current generation" but I noticed that it does not have the top LCD. And I rely on my K100D's top LCD to remind me of the camera's settings, which I have a bad tendency to forget. So a used K-3 wound up being what I bought, even though it's really more camera than I need.
As for what I tend to photograph: I'm very much an amateur. I enjoy taking pictures of scenery (landscapes) when we're traveling and I also take a fair number of pictures of flowers and other plants. I take family snapshots, but I'm not really into trying to get portraits---my kids just would never sit still long enough and cooperate to get a portrait. Because we're close to Niagara Falls, I've taken lots and lots of pictures of them in all kinds of weather. Over the years, I've managed to take some really great photos that have wowed family and friends, but its still hit or miss a lot of the time, which doesn't really bother me at all.
Well that's far longer than it needed to be. So thanks for being patient with me.
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