Camera Advice for someone starting out

[LWW]

There are so many good choices in manual focus 35 MM cameras...Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Mamiya, Pentax, Minolta, Kodak, Exakta...and if you buy right and with a little luck you can make money a few years down the road if you want to upgrade.

LWW

 

[rogue]

I ended up getting something from my father - something we bought back when we lived in Japan - it's by Canon.. nothing too fancy - but it does the job!

 

[fotogenik]

when you have the money you can buy the dslr, and give the P&S to your wife ...... lol

Funny that's exactly what I did, When she bought me my d50 I gave her my Canon Powershot A60.

 

[Luminosity]

I am going to go anti here and say buy a decent Nikon/Canon/Olympus/Minolta 35 mm SLR and a 50 mm lens of f2.0 or faster and a top shutter speed of at least 1/1,000 of a second.

I was about to suggest the same thing. I started off with a Minolta X-570 SLR and think it's a great way to start off if you're interested in going the film route.

http://www.sds.com/mug/x-570.html

I remember attending the free half day photography class the store gave me when I purchased the camera and the teacher, a guy in his late 50's who had spent many years as a pro-photog, kept singling my camera and another girl's camera out ...as we were the only ones with the older SLR's and he enjoyed the fact that we were trying to learn the art of photography without all the 'whiz-bang features' of new cameras. Kept telling the class that if they could master a good, basic film camera then capturing great images on the newer, more expensive cameras would be par-for-the-course.

I will add though, I took many a roll of film at the beginning ( and it still happens now occassionally ) where the pictures didnt turn out: blurry,underexposed,overexposed, too grainy etc etc and I was frustrated ( not to mention that I spent good money on film and developing ) but it forced me to go back to the drawing board and take another go at it and really think about the images I wanted to capture.
As, each shot is money right.