During the last couple years I’ve let my photography languish. This was due to me pushing to finish my Bachelor degree (graduated August 2009), being lazy, and being spoiled by my digital point-and-shoot camera. Once our move from the west to the east coast is over and we’ve settled into a new house, I plan to recommit to getting mack into photography. I’ll probably get back to using my Canon EOS 3 for a while before replacing it with a digital SLR, but we’ll see how that goes...I may stay with my beloved film SLR.

I've looked around for the easiest and cleanest way to show my photos online before I settled on using iPhoto and Galerie. I'm using a personally modified version of a Galerie template called Aqua2 which is part of Galerie Collection 7.

Enjoy.

We finally took the plunge and bought ourselves a Canon SD800IS digital point and shoot camera along with a 2GB Sandisk SD memory card. So far we love it.

My primary camera body is my Canon EOS 3 which I purchased as an upgrade to my mostly manual Pentax P3n body. I decided on this camera for its comprehensive feature list, features I either thought I needed, or features I knew I needed. It was and probably still is more camera than I actually need.

When looking for lenses, I read and read and didn't want to accept any compromises in quality, so I settled on fixed focal length lenses. The following is a list of my few lenses and my flash:

• Canon EF 24mm f/2.8 This is a great wide-angle lens. Useful for landscapes and distorted perspective close-ups.


• Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 Hard to pass this lens by. It cost $65 new and has very sharp optics. Wish it was build a little better (it's all plastic) but I've owned it since 2001 and it hasn't broken.


• Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro This macro lens is my favorite lens so far. It allows up to 1:1 magnification and has been said to be Canon's sharpest lens under $3000. Focussing is fast, but not necessary since I tweak the focus on close-ups anyways.


• Canon 420EX Speedlight This isn't the ideal flash for my EOS 3, but the 550EX (the flash designed for the EOS 3) is a little pricey for what I need and use it for. The 420EX has served me well and I love it.

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My Pentax P3n was given to me by my mom and is now my secondary and travel camera. It is built like a tank and helped me learn what all the controls do. It is manual-focussing but has aperture- or shutter-priority modes so it's not 100% manual which is a huge relief. Here are the Pentax lenses and extender I use:

• SMC Pentax-A 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5 A very handy and small walk-around lens.


• ProSpec 80-200mm f/3.9 lens Never heard of ProSpec but they made this constant aperture zoom lens that is actually very good. I bring this one to the zoos.


• Vivatar Automatic Teleconverter 2x This teleconverter is a piece of crap but it does allow me to extend my 80-200mm lens out to 400mm for some decent photos.

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I also use a the following miscellaneous gear:

• Bogen Manfrotto 3021 BPro Tripod Can't take 400mm or macro photos without a tripod. This is one of the most popular tripods for amateurs and I love it! Simple to set-up, relatively light, and solid.


• Bogen Manfrotto 486QR Ball Head I had trouble deciding on a ball head or pan-tilt head but eventually settled on a ball head for it's range of motion. I have no complains about this one. Both the ball head and tripod can support up to 13lbs.


• Films and transparencies: Agfa Ulta 100 , Fuji Superia X-Tra 100, 400, 800, Fuji Velvia 100F , Fuji NPH 400, and Fuji NPC 160.  I will probably end up using more and more Fuji films simply because the local Wal-Mart uses the Fuji Frontier developer which I've heard great things about.


• MacPro computer: 2.66GHz dual dual-core (quad-core) Intel Xeon processor with 3GB FB-DIMM ECC memory. Spectacular computer.


• I scan photos and slides with my Canoscan 8400F which I recommend highly.

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Notes:

• Shopping for lenses is a maddening experience (ask Min-Ah).  This information was taken from Photo Zone. The exact information is no longer online, but I printed it to .pdf and it is available at my Photographic Files area for download.
  
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