February 2005. Self-portrait in bathroom mirror. (flipped) It wasn't planned, but this picture happens to be number 4,000 taken with my new camera. I bought my first digital camera in 2000, in the spur of the moment: a 2.1 megapixel Toshiba PDR-M4. The very next day, a coworker introduced me to Digital Photograpy Review (DPReview) and I learned you can actually *read reviews about cameras* before buying one. I drooled over the recently released $2,500 Olympus 2100UZ, a 2.1 megapizel with 10x optical zoom, and optical stabilization. A year and a half later, I bought it new for $500. The exceptional sharpness of the Olympus lens kept me from upgrading to higher megapixels for 3 years. However, when I saw the pictures taken with the new "budget" digital SLRs, (Canon Digital Rebel, Nikon 70D), I couldn't believe the difference in noise, especially in low-light, which is where a lot of my family pictures are taken. November 2004, I spent more than I had on my last two cars combined, and bought the Canon EOS 20D with 3 Canon lenses: 50mm f1.4 USM, 17-85mm IS USM, and 75-300mm IS USM. Suddenly, I'm bonkers about learning the basics of ISO speed, aperture, and shutter speed. I still use P-mode a lot, and do a lot of post-editing. A lot.
And as written in a review of the 2100UZ at amazon.com:
I bought my first digital camera in 2000, as an impulse buy: a 2.1 megapixel Toshiba PDR-M4. The very next day, a coworker introduced me to Digital Photograpy Review (DPReview.com) and I learned you can actually *read reviews about cameras* before buying one. I drooled over the recently released $2,500 Olympus 2100UZ, the 10x optical zoom and optical stabilization. A year and a half later, I bought it new for $500. The exceptional sharpness of the Olympus lens kept me from upgrading to higher megapixels for 3 years --and I'm a shutter bug (howland-dot-smugmug-dot-com -some 2100UZ photos there too) In 2003, I bought another 2100UZ for my father in France. It wasn't until I saw the low noise of D-SLRs (and their drop under $1K -Digital Rebel!) that I decided to upgrade. By then, late 2004, the 2100UZ had turned me into such a lover of photography, that I bought a Canon 20D. Nothing else could justify putting the 2100UZ down. I still own it, and the kids use it. Last year, I used it all night at a school dance, while I lent my 20D to another parent for the portraits. Total blast. Editing JPEG is not as fun as editing RAW, but shooting again with that first love was an absolute blast. (photos of that event are also on said site: howland-dot-smugmug-dot-com :-)
