Originally posted by davids8560 Forgive me but I enjoyed reading your post and I am kind of new so now I would like to know apart from the absence of film what controls are so different between the K1000 and my K5 for example?
I'll preface this by saying the K3 is my first DSLR. I've dabbled with a few P&S digital cameras, but that's it. And the following is one man's opinion.
If you ignore the autofocus, auto exposure system and all the systems/controls supporting the sensor, nothing really. As it so happens, my primary SLR was the K1000 I bought with grass cutting money I saved up in 1987. The K3 has depth of field preview and mirror lockup, something K1000 lacked, but the nicer Pentax ME Super had back in the day did. The one important control the K5/K3 has that film cameras didn't is adjustable ISO (sensitivity). In the film days, you had to select film based on sensitivity, contrast, resolution (grain/noise), color vs. B&W, reversal vs. positive (slide) etc. Now most of these are selectable, but there are always trade-offs. Just like faster film was generally grainier, a sensor operated at higher sensitivity will be noisier.
All the other basics like focal length, aperture, shutter speed and focus are the same as they were when the first Daguerreotype was taken in 1838. Every camera has the same basics: a lens (group) to bend the light, a mechanism to bring it into focus, a light sensitive medium to record the image, a shutter (mechanical or digital) and aperture (which might be fixed or adjustible). If you understand the basics like the above mentioned relationship between DoF, focal length, etc, the brand and type of camera you use is largely irrelevant. It's just a matter of learning how it operates. You can learn to estimate exposure with your eye, use an incident meter, use the simple averaging meter in the ol' K1000 or the 86,000 pixel RGB metering sensor in the K3. I think one of the most important things to understand is all the extra whiz-bang features on a camera (multi-segment autofocus, multi-zone exposure, fuzzy logic, noise reductions) can be extremely helpful, but if you don't know the basics and/or you don't know how those extra features work, you will not be in control, the camera will be. For example the center weighted meter in the K1000 was far from perfect, but if you understood how it works and what its flaws and weaknesses were, it could be used to great effect.
Cameras don't take great photos, people do. Some of the great iconic photos of the 20th century were taken with cameras with fully manual controls, fixed lenses and *maybe* a basic light meter. Weegee with his Speed Graphic, Henri Cartrier-Bresson with his his Leica rangefinder and Ansel Adams lugging his 8x10 around rose to be considered masters at their craft with no automation whatsoever.