Digital photography at $8 per exposure, not counting paper   Dec. 28, 2005
My wife and I bought our son an Olympus D-395 last Christmas. He loved the idea of having a digital camera, but never seemed to use it, instead complaining that the 16MB starter card didn't hold enough pictures. In the last 12 months, he has taken literally less than three dozen exposures with the nice little 2MP camera. Whenever it has been out of his dresser drawer, I have been nearby. I know for a fact that the camera has never been dropped or mistreated in any way, and it has been stored carefully in a clean, dry environment inside a padded case. It looks brand new. I took a few frames with it a month ago, and they made nice 8x10 prints. The flash recycled slowly. So I bought a 256MB memory card for our son for this Christmas, and a replacement lithium battery. Christmas morning, he popped in the card and the old battery appeared to be completely dead. So we inserted the new battery. And the camera was still completely dead. A couple of days later, I brought it to the local camera shop. They tried yet another battery. Nothing. Our alternatives at this point are: 1) Spend a minimum of $125 and possibly $200 to repair the camera that originally cost $190, or 2) throw it away. I've had great luck with Olympus film cameras. We still have a battered 13-year-old Stylus that works great. It is just a symptom of our throwaway society, but digital cameras simply are not repairable the way mechanical cameras were. I'm upset that a $190 camera only worked for 30 exposures and now is a piece of trash. But it makes me glad I bought the bargain $400 CP8400 instead of stretching to spend $1,000 or more for a better camera. No matter which one I buy, in two or three years, any digital camera bought this year is going to be old, outmoded and quite possibly dead. Right now, I have a new $15 battery and a new $38 256MB xD memory card and no use for them. I hesitate to buy a new camera for my son from Olympus, but that's about the only company that makes cameras that use xD cards and that particular battery. So the card and the battery are toast, too. Even if I don't try to eat them, I have a sour taste in my mouth.

I wimped out and bought a Nikon Coolpix 8400   Dec. 19, 2005
Now that film gear has lost much of its resale value, I'm kicking myself for not selling off all that stuff a year or more ago. Now, my beloved Nikon F4 is worth less than half what it was 12 months ago, my Nikon FM even less, and most of my manual focus lenses haven't fared much better. Tears fill my pocketbook, taking up the space I had hoped would be filled with cash. After using eBay successfully for several years, I had a rash of bad luck with the result that I'm down two lenses, out a bunch of eBay fees, and slightly wiser. I now plan to try and sell my film gear locally through consignment at a camera shop. In the past, I was an enthusiastic eBay user. After dealing with an unreasonable buyer, ridiculous overseas shipping problems and other headaches, I'm not sure I'll ever trust the eBay system again. With the little profit from my painful eBay experiences in my pocket, I was still vacillating between wanting a Sony R1 or a D70 and 12-24mm Tokina. Then I saw Ritz Camera's ad for Nikon CP8400s for $400. That was a camera I had seriously considered a year ago when it was priced at $900. If anything is sure these days, it's that electronics prices are always going to come down. The shop let me take some images with one, and the 8MP Extra Fine images looked great on my computer screen. I bought it for myself for Christmas. I love the 24mm-equivalent lens (which zooms out to 85mm), a crucial 4mm wider than the stock lens on the D70 I use. The CP8400 is delightfully small and lightweight. The big thing I gave up was ISO speed. The CP8400 gets really grainy at its top ISO of 400, so I limit myself to 200 tops. That seems to be okay so far, and on sunny days, the minimum ISO of 50 produces great images with no grain at all. By comparison, the D70 minimum is 200 ISO, is usable at up to 600 or 800, and is grainy at the maximum 1600 ISO.

Plans to downsize my gear bag, maybe   Oct. 13, 2005
It has become plain to me that age and a change of employment have led to a decrease in my desire to carry a heavy bag of camera gear everywhere I go. It pains me to admit that a mere 10 or 12 pounds now seems like a lot to hang from my shoulder. But that's the way it is. I used to lug my F4s fitted with a 20mm lens in a gadget bag with an 85mm, a 200mm and maybe a 55mm macro everyday. But film is a thing of the past in professional photography, and, personally, I am weary of making two trips to WalMart to drop off and pick up film before I can see my work come to fruition. My film gear is gathering dust while I use either my silly old Coolpix 990 or my employer's D70s. It's time to sell my grab bag of film Nikon gear. While I won't shed tears as it heads to that big FedEx truck in the sky, I am having psychological issues with saying goodbye to film. I pretty much decided more than a year ago that I would sell everything to finance a D70 and a couple of lenses. But, inexplicably, I dragged my feet. Then I figured out that I could sell everything except my F4, 20mm, 105mm and 200mm and still be able to afford the D70 with 18-70 lens. But months dragged by and still my hands refused to get the signal that it was time to start those eBay auctions. Now, here it is, a year and half after the original decision, and the dust is still gathering. Sure, I have the excuse that my employer just bought a D70s and a couple of lenses, and I can use that for work. But I need a personal digital camera that'll perform better than the old CP990. Well, now I've changed my mind again and know I should sell EVERYTHING I own. But I don't want to repeat my experience of the ever-expanding camera bag that gets so heavy I stop carrying it. I need to decide between the D70s with a maximum of two lenses or the recently-announced Sony DSC-R1.