I've never actually pursued film photography outside of the occasional shot on my friend's Minolta Maxxum 7000, and at that I've never really considered what I'm shooting on while using it.

My first experience with a camera was with my grandfather's Polaroid Sun600, which featured an extremely basic point-and-shoot design. The first camera that I could call my own was an Olympus D-520Z, a relatively inexpensive (for 2002, at least) digital point-and-shoot camera. In retrospect, I suppose it wasn't "bad", though calling it "good" would be an exaggeration: it decided to determine virtually every quality setting digitally, with no means of overriding the system if it turned out to be incapable of determining the optimal settings for a given scene.

I now use an Olympus C-3000Z, which I'm rather happy with. It maintains the automatic controls and has a fully manual override mode in the event that the processor screws up. It's not an SLR, of course, and the viewfinder is terribly misaligned - though since it's digital, I can always use the LCD screen instead.
Don_HH2K | Homepage | 04.07.08 - 10:59 pm | #

I took a photography class in 11th grade. Before I took the class I knew nothing about photography other other than maybe how to look through a viewfinder and press "that button the top of the camera."

I throughly enjoyed photography and shooting photographs with an SLR, but dealing with the film and developing the film was another story. I'd really like to get back into "real" photography sometime, but I fear that finding film and all the chemicals necessary to develop the film may be hard to come by because it seems that film photography is a dying breed.
Billy | Homepage | 04.08.08 - 11:00 pm | #

Yeah, it's a bit tougher now to do "serious" film photography than it used to be. As a case in point, there's only one lab left in the country that can develop Kodachrome slide film, and from what I hear it doesn't do a very good job.

I never did have an opportunity to develop color film by myself...and frankly, I found black-and-white film hard enough!
Andrew T. | Homepage | 04.11.08 - 10:56 am | #