Choosing a brand: If you like to see people arguing passionately, defending their position as if the world's existence depended on them making their point, ask what brand of camera to buy with a Nikon and a Canon owner present. I've heard numerous arguments, many quite silly, honestly, between these two groups. The reality is that Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax all make great cameras. You should make your choice after reading (if you can find any) unbiased reviews, talking to owners of various brands, and then going to the camera store several times, holding the cameras in your hand, weighing the costs, and deciding which camera you like. If you don't like the way a camera feels in your hands, little else may matter. Don't let any pushy salesman talk you into buying something like an expensive DSLR until you are ready to buy it. Unless you are really wealthy, a DSLR may be a significant bite out of your budget and you may not be able to replace it for a while, so be sure you are happy with what you are buying.

My first "real" camera was a Pentax ME Super 35mm. My decision was based on knowing that Pentax had a good reputation and the camera was on sale at a nearby camera store for a very good price. I was really excited the day I bought that camera and it proved to be a great camera, After a year or so, the camera got stolen along with the lenses and flash that I had for it. So I was back to square one. I decided to buy a Nikon FE2. I was not unhappy with Pentax, but the FE2 had some amazing features, most notably, a 1/4000 second top shutter speed and 1/250 second flash sync. The 1/4000 shutter speed was an incredible feat for a camera in the early 1980s. I never actually used the 1/4000 shutter speed, but I thought it was really cool that I could say my camera could do that. The fastest film available then was ISO 1000, so when would anyone really need a shutter speed of 1/4000 second? I used the FE2 for many years. I used it for the last time in 2004, just before I bought my first serious DSLR - the Nikon D70. I still have the FE2 though; too sentimentally attached to ever think of selling it. Before buying the D70 I bought one of the first Kodak digital cameras on the market (1mp) for $500 (gasp). That camera was a joke. I remember thinking and voicing my opinion that digital had no chance of ever replacing film. Well, I was wrong. The next camera I bought a few years later was a Kodak 4mp with a zoom lens on it. It was certainly much better than the first one and I took a lot of photographs with it, but still used the FE2 for anything serious.

So why did I go back to Nikon when I decided to buy a serious DSLR? Because my experience with the FE2 ahd been so great and because I had an investment in accessories for the Nikon line. Accessories such as lenses and a bellows. Every lens Nikon has ever made still fits the cameras they make today. The bellows proved invaluable when I decided to convert all of my Kodachrome slides to digital format and I used my Nikkor 55mm Micro lens to accomplish that task as well. What I'm leading up to here is this; When you buy a camera and then begin to buy lenses and other accessories, your investment increases sharply and changing brands is even more expensive. In addition there is all the time you will spend acquiring all of the accessories. I stayed with Nikon not only because Nikon makes very high quality products, but because of the investment I had already made in the brand.

If I was starting from scratch today, I'm not sure what brand I would choose. When I bought the FE2 many years ago one of the things I did not like about Canaon cameras was the Shutter Priority mode they chose. With 35mm cameras there was no option to choose from Shutter Priority or Aperature Priority, you were stuck with the way the camera was designed. For me, the aperature is crucial to the artistic look of an image because it is how you adjust the depth of field. It just never made sense to me to let the camera make that decision. Of course, that issue does not exist today and Canon and Nikon go back and forth as the current reigning champ of digital imaging, so it would be much more difficult now to decide. And, lest we should forget, Pentax, Olympus and others also make very good DSLRs, so we shouldn't limit the choice to Nikon and Canon.

Things to consider first: 

• What are you buying this camera for?
• How serious are you about photography?
• Do you want to edit your images or just shoot and print?
• What are you going to be photographing?
• Are you serious about the quality of your photos?
• Do you think an expensive camera will make you a good photographer?
• If you know next to nothing, are you willing to study?

DSLR Camera or Computer with a lens: Today's DSLRs are literally computers with lenses attached to them. Current DSLR cameras have more computing power than the first home computers had. And they use a lot more memory. Three images from my D7000 would take up more storage space than my first 286 computer had on its 40 meg hard drive. The camera writes to the SD card faster than a 386 could write to its internal drive. Current DSLRs are complex machines. Learning to get the full benefit from one takes some reading and lots of practice. There is no reason to buy a high-end DSLR and shoot JPEGs of your pets or family get togethers. There are many point and shoot cameras on the market that do a fantastic job with a minimal learning curve. Would you buy a 30 passenger bus to drive only yourself to work every day? If the expense of a DSLR is not an issue and you want one because it makes you happy, then you should buy it. If the expense is a concern to you and you are not really that serious about photography, consider buying what you need and not what appears to be the coolest gadget in the store. If you start small and realize that you have a passion for photography, you can always buy a DSLR later and keep the point and shoot to carry in your purse (ladies) or you shirt pocket. I bought my wife a Nikon P90 (great point and shoot) a couple of years ago. Even though she has since acquired a Nikon D80, she still uses the P90 quite a bit because it is small and convenient; she can carry it in her purse.

Editing digital images: Shooting in RAW mode - RAW literally means raw, it's not an acronym - gives the photographer the most latitude in the final product. A RAW image is all of the data that the camera's sensor captured, unchanged by any processing in the camera. JPEG images, on the other hand, are changed significantly by the camera's processing chips. You are letting the people who designed your camera decide how the image should look. If this is ok with you, and you don't want to spend time editing photos, then use JPEGs - and buy a point and shoot camera. If you care about the final look of your images use RAW. I'm not really trying to say choose one or the other. Perhaps you like to shoot landscapes at times and you want to produce something beyond what the camera will do in JPEG mode and other times you just want to shoot photos of the kids to send to the family in email. Use the DSLR for both, just don't waste your money on a lot of technology you will never use. When you shoot in JPEG mode, your camera may discard 80-90% of the information that hit the sensor. On top of that, every time you save a JPEG, some of the data is thrown out. JPEG is a lossy format. The opposite is true with RAW files.

Ok, on to editing. In my opinion, Adobe Photoshop is hands down the best tool for editing photos. Adobe Camera Raw (part of Photoshop) is an incredible tool that allows users to accomplish a significant portion of the workflow before ever opening an image in Photoshop. Using Adobe Bridge, Adobe Camera Raw, and Adobe Photoshop together offers virtually unlimited possibilities with photos. Consider the following 2 photos....

The photo on the left is overexposed. It's not bad as snapshots go, but I wasn't happy with it. I was happy with the composition however, so I used Photoshop and an application called Photomatix to fix the issue. I used Camera Raw to create a series of images in which I reduced the exposure setting of the RAW file by 1 stop each, saved them as TIFF images and then used Photomatix to merge the images into the HDR image on the right. I wouldn't have been able to do that with a JPEG. I could have made it look a bit better, but not nearly like the image in the right. It took me less than 15 minutes to create the new image. With RAW files, areas that look washed out may still contain enough data to recover the oiginal scene.

What will your subject matter be?: The previous text has covered this subject a bit, so I'll try not to be repetitive and boring. It's worth repeating though, that you should consider your intentions when deciding what type of camera to buy. Do you want to create beautiful images that others enjoy seeing or do you just want to capture some memories and let it go at that. I love going out, taking hundreds of photos, then coming back home, opening up Bridge, reviewing the images, deciding which ones are worth further work, and then posting the final results on my site for others to see. Occasionally, I make prints, frame them and hang them on the wall, or create a book using Blurb. I love to try to reveal the full potential of a well composed photo. For those reasons, spending thousands of dollars on cameras, lenses, software, hard drives, etc... is worth it to me.

  If you have aspirations to use a camera professionally, for instance to be a wedding photographer, sports photographer, portrait photogrpaher, or all of those, then your needs are going to be more specific than someone who likes to take landscapes. Weddings are hard work. A typical wedding day may mean 12 hours for the photographer (I have shot several weddings). You will likely want to photograph the bride and her brides maids getting ready, maybe some pre-wedding shots of the groom and his best man and friends, food being cooked, guests arriving, bride and groom moments before the wedding, the ceremony, and then the reception. You will be carrying (if your smart) 2 cameras around your neck, running back and forth, squating, kneeling...for hours. Then you will spend many more hours going through the photos deciding which ones to edit, then editing them, preparing them for presentation, perhaps making a book. You will soon find out why wedding photography is so expensive. You only have one chance to get it correct, so you better be prepared when you go in. You will need high quality lenses, at least 3 batteries, plenty of flash cards and other equipment.

Photography is one of my passions. You have to decide what level of commitment and expense is right for you. I'm just trying to give you the basic facts to help you think it all through. And, of course, regardless of my opinion, you can buy any camera you want and do whatever you like with it if it makes you happy. Chance favors the prepared individual, so you may buy that expense camera and only shoot pics of your cat for a year, then one day you look outside and see a UFO beaming people out of their house. It will be good if you are prepared with a capable camera to photograph such an event.

Camera vs Photograher, which is the most important?: For me this question is easy to answer; the photographer is much more important than the camera. A really nice camera is a great asset, but for someone who pays no attention to light sources, composition, subject, or the moment, the best camera in the world is useless. I've known several people through the years who purchased really nice cameras and never took anything more than a nice snapshot with it. I've also seen people take great shots with point and shoot cameras. A really good photographer can take a great shot with a 4mp point and shoot camera with a fixed focal length lens. Someone who simply points at something and pushes the shutter release button may be lucky to get a good shot every few hundred photos. Photography can be an art. Being artistic means spending some time learning at least a few basic principles such as the Rule of Thirds, lighting, and contrast.