I've been an amateur photographer for a number of years, cutting my teeth on cheap point and shoots as a kid, then using my mother's Canon AV-1 and later a Canon Rebel G . At present, my kit consists of a Canon F-1 (specifically the 1976 F-1, the second model of camera Canon made with the F-1 designation), a Canon S100 Digital Elph , and a Yashica T4 Super D . I left the Rebel G behind in New York when I moved out to San Francisco, and brought the other three with me.
The F-1 is essentially brand new. My grandfather recently handed it down to me early in 2002. He bought it new from Japan while he was living in Brazil in the 70's and put "maybe 15 rolls of film through it" before putting up on the shelf. The condition is pristine as far as I can tell, with no finish rubbed off (common for used F-1s) and no surface scratches at all. The thing is a tank. All metal construction means my forearms get a workout taking pictures instead of just when I go climbing. It does lack a mercury battery, however, meaning I don't currently have the benefit of the electronic metering needle in the viewfinder. I have thus far (as of October 2002) exposed about three to five rolls of film with it.
The S100 developed some weird issues in mid-June 2002, where all the photos started coming out grainy and the AF strobe always lights and strobes in the same pattern regardless of what it's focusing on. Images all look distinctly fuzzy and out of focus compared to previous shots, even in higher quality modes. I'm pretty sure I need to send it back to Canon for official diagnosis and tweaking, but it's out of warranty as far as I know (I bought it in January 2001) and I'm afraid of how much it'll cost to fix.
The Elph was my head-first plunge into digital photography. Overall, I can say that I'm pleased with the swim so far. The convenience of being able to snap photos of reasonable quality and upload them to the web has its charms. I am perhaps inordinately proud of the very first photo I took with this camera, which I thought came out really well. I bought a 64 MB Compact Flash card when I bought the camera as the included 8 MB card wasn't going to be doing me any good. I found that I preferred shooting on the middle quality setting, called "L" on the camera itself, which gives 1600 by 1200 pixel images at 24 bits per pixel. This allowed me to get a reasonable number of images on the media, and I didn't see much improvement with the highest quality setting, which just chewed up space. I typically ran out of battery power before filling the card. The small size of the Elph afforded it to be in my pocket nearly always, the profile was unbeatable for convenience and portability. The mild amount of optical zoom is nice; I largely stayed away from the digital zoom almost entirely.
Particular things I dislike about the Elph include the fixed ISO 100 exposure speed. Hand holding the camera, it's very hard to not get the little "camera wobble" warning indicator in the LED screen, and many photos do come out fuzzy due to shaking. I also took a number of shots in less than ideal light, which this camera is totally not suited for at all. The flash has a tendency, like any built-in point and shoot flash, to add red eye and to white everything out, or give really unnatural skin tones when shooting in dark environmentss. I liked taking this camera to nightclubs, but I grew increasingly afraid of shooting with it due to the fixed ISO and bad flash handling.
I'm forever pondering getting more gear. At the moment, I'm looking for excellent condition prime lenses for the F-1 (such as a backup for the 50mm 1:1.4 SSC FD lens I have now), as well as other equipment for the F-1. There's a few reasons why. For one, the F-1 and all the lenses for it are all long discontiuned. This means that they tend to be cheap, since most people opt to buy the newer modern gear. Unlike Nikon, Canon has changed its lens mount system, so the FD lenses don't work on newer bodies. Because the gear is old, it's less readily available and you have to scour nth-hand markets for it. The entire system is also very much built to last. Heavy, yes, but solid. Even though quiet cameras are desirable, there is something viscerally satisfying about the pronounced shutter noise the F-1 makes. The SSC prime lenses are among some of the best Canon ever made. The basic mechanical build means I don't have to worry about not getting shots due to forgetting to change or charge batteries or delete frames off of my RAM media.
I've wanted a more modern "pro" 35mm SLR system for a while, after running into a number of things in the Rebel G I disliked when I tried to push it beyond the bounds of "beginner" SLR photography, which happened really early in my use of it. For a while, I considered the Nikon N90s , but I've now re-targeted on the Nikon F100 . Why Nikon, given that I have a fair bit of Canon gear? Well, for one, I prefer Nikon lenses. When I've shot with Nikons, I've been more impressed with their consistent lens quality over the years. Also, I can use all those old lenses on modern bodies, which has its uses.
I use Adobe Photoshop and ImageReady , like most of the rest of anyone who takes photos and dorks around with computers and the web. I also use ACDSee and IrfanView , two image viewing programs that I would be somewhat lost without. Besides that, I have various OEM-supplied software for manipuating photos off of Canon PowerShot and Fuji FinePix digital cameras, but I tend not to use much of it past just getting the files to my disk.
My next photo-related software project will be around asset management. I need some sort of useable application that will allow me to keep track of equipment, film, negatives, prints, reprints, finished digital images, raw files, software, processes, slides, loans, rented gear, media, and more.
My primary computer these days is a somewhat battered but hardy Toshiba Satellite 4270 laptop, with a zesty but so-three-years-ago 500 MHz Intel Celeron processor and a weak 192 MB RAM and 12 GB total disk space. The maximum resolution on my laptop's display is 1024 by 768 pixels. Photoshop is best used on a beefy machine with loads of fast disk, RAM, a great video card, and an expensive studio quality display or two, each the size of a small yacht.
I also have an Apple PowerBook G3 500 MHz "Pismo", but I need a new power adapter for it, and it could use two new batteries. It's presently out of comission.
I'm still working on putting together an image gallery I'm willing to show to random strangers on the Internet, in terms of the images presented, the layout that will be nicest across the widest array of clients, and the software necessary to make that all happen. Which is a long way of saying "there's no gallery yet".