What digital camera should I buy?

Thanks for the kind words regarding my photography. In fact, I haven't had much chance to take pictures in a while so all too many of the photos on my Colorado Portraits site are a year or two old. Further, I'm just transitioning from my older Nikon digital gear to the very latest and greatest, so let me tell you about my own hands-on experience with digital cameras.

First off, for a little camera, I've had Kodak cameras and hated them (fuzzy, fuzzy!), had a Leica camera that turned out to be a rebranded Fuji digital which I really liked (until we dropped it one too many times, alas), and my wife now has and just adores her Canon SD550 camera:

This little 7.1 megapixel wonder is just a little bit bigger than a pack of playing cards, with a bright 2.5-inch LCD display and optical viewfinder (I really don't like the cameras that only use the LCD screen, though they're all heading that way as us old dinosaur photographers become irrelevant :-). More to our surprise, the little movies it records are pretty darn good too, and perfect for capturing that funny moment. Not HD-DVD ready, but we certainly don't care. At about $300, I highly recommend this as a pocket digital.

My camera setup is a bit more complex, however, though I should preface my comments by saying that I have a strong preference for never changing camera lenses when I'm shooting, so a wide focal-range lens is top of my list.

The photos on the Colorado Portraits.com site were all taken with a Nikon D100 digital SLR, one of the first released by Nikon a few years ago. It's a great workhorse of a camera, and with the 28-200 zoom from Nikon, I've had some splendid shoots and a lot of fun. Indeed, with sequential photo numbering, you can have up to 10,000 pictures before you cycle and I realize that I've taken about 13,000 pictures with the camera since I bought it.

I keep an eye out for new Nikon gear, however, and when they announced the new Nikon D80 I decided it was time to upgrade. (Having a friend's wife fall in love with my D100 and offer to buy it used didn't hurt either!)

Let me just quote Nikon for the full specs:

The D80 packs high performance and high resolution into a body that is more compact and slimmer than previous Nikon digital SLR cameras. True to Nikon's commitment to intuitive operation, the size, layout and operation of all buttons and controls are designed for maximum ease of use.

10.2 effective megapixel - Nikon DX format CCD Optimized to capture sharp details, the 10.2 effective megapixel CCD image sensor yields extraordinarily high-resolution images, providing plenty of freedom to crop creatively or print impressive enlargements.

Advanced Auto Exposure system - Consistently dependable exposure is the hallmark of Nikon's exclusive 3D-Color Matrix Metering II. Refinements for the D80 include its inheriting the advanced exposure evaluation system from the Nikon D2Xs and D200 digital SLR cameras. Brightness, color, contrast, selected focus area and camera-to-subject distance information is evaluated, with the results referenced against the expansive onboard database of exposure data from over 30,000 actual photographic scenes, and the final exposure value calculated - instantly. Variable-size center-weighted metering is also available, as are a choice of 11 spot meters linked to each of the 11-area AF system's area sensors.

Broad ISO-equivalent sensitivity range - The D80 features extensive range for sure performance through diverse lighting conditions. Sensitivity can be set manually between ISO speeds of 100 and 1600 in 1/3-EV increments, or boosted even higher using the HI-0.3, HI-0.7 or HI-1 settings. Automatic sensitivity adjustment (ISO AUTO) is also available offering the freedom to concentrate on composition while the camera selects the right sensitivity for the shot.

Precision white balance - Advanced Auto White Balance (AWB) produces natural coloration by matching white balance to the light source of the shot. Other flexible options include a choice of six specific manual settings with fine-tuning, (Incandescent, Fluorescent, Direct Sunlight, Flash, Cloudy, and Shade), as well as a preset option for using a gray or white object as a reference.

... and so much more. You can learn more about this groovy new camera at Nikon's D80 Info Page

In addition, I'm also getting the newly introduced Nikon 18-200mm VR lens, which has a great focal range, particularly when you remember that the way that digital SLRs work gives you about a 1.5x focal conversion, so when the lens is set to 18mm, your effective result is 18 x 1.5 or 27mm. This means that the zoom has a pretty amazing 27mm-300mm "effective" focal range. Sweet! Perfect for those of us that like to take pictures without fussing with gear and lenses.

Two more pieces complete the set. I use - and love - the Nikon SB800 Speedlight, a fast, powerful and flexible flash designed for digital work. A tip: I usually ratchet it down anywhere from 1/2 to 1 full stop from what the camera tells it to use so I can have more nuanced light and less white glare.

The final piece is my computer-based photo management application. For years I've been slogging along without a real management system, just organizing pictures using GraphicConverter on my Mac, a shareware program for image conversion, of all things.

Recently, however, I attended an Apple workshop on Aperture software and am sold on the virtues and benefits of the program, so the arrival of the D80 will also mark my transition into a professional photography management system. I have high hopes that this combo will make me a more efficient photographer with better results, both online and in print!

Anyway, a long answer with lots of product links. All told, I'm dropping about $2000 into new photographic gear. That's quite a pricetag, but everything I have heard and read about the D80 makes me believe that it's going to be a splendid upgrade and I'm just as excited to dig into Aperture and learn how to really manage my workflow effectively too!

Having said all that, I have colleagues who are quite fanatical about Canon digital SLR gear too and I've seen stunning work that they've shot, so I'm confident that you can't go wrong with Canon SLR gear either. Really, we're at the golden age of digital photography in some sense, because there's just an abundance of terrific gear and sometimes you can end up deciding simply based on body color, company brand identity or similar trivia.

Regardless of what path you travel, good luck to you! And the rest of you photographers out there, what are you shooting with and how do you find it works for you?