Ive been a member of this site for a the last year or so but not once have i ever posted a picture. now im trying to raise up the money to get a nice camera so i can do some good photography work but i have no idea what type of camera i should get. if anyone can help me with this little problem of mine i would be extremely happy.

First thing. How much are you willing to spend?

and how much control do you want?

1, buy the best one you can afford.

2, Buy from a manufacturer who has been making cameras for a long time, they know how to make good ones. Canon, Nikon, Minolta, Pentax, Olympus and Ricoh (but not necessarily in that order) are all good.

3, You will use auto everything at first and that’s ok. Make sure you get manual control of the shutter speed, aperture and focus. They allow you to take control later on when your creativity kicks in and you want to experiment. Some cameras have buttons to drive the focus in and out but a ring on the lens that you grab hold of and turn is quicker and more accurate but might be out of your price range.

4, Good quality used cameras in good condition are a better buy than cheap new ones.

5, Budget to get an image editor too, your going to need one.

6, Budget for a memory card. If you get one with the camera it won’t be big enough.

I hope this helps rather than confuses you.

The goal of all amateur photographers is to buy an SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera that views its subject through the lens instead of through a separate viewfinder lens. In the digital realm this means seeing optically through the lens, since some cameras have a small LCD in the viewfinder that shows what the lens sees. While this is useful its resolution is limited by is size. Digital SLR's generally have interchangeable lenses, and are relatively expensive. The lenses are even more expensive. By expensive I mean in the neighborhood of $1000.

I have owned three digital cameras, and the best for the money was the Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ10 4MPX camera. It had an amazingly clear Leica lens that had an image stabilizer that compensated for hand movement, and had an incredible ability to collect huge amounts of light at 12 power optical zoom while still retaining the ablility to shoot clear macro (extreme closeup) shots. As far as image clarity is concerned it was better than the SLR I have now. What it lacked was the high resolution (8MPX) that the digital SLR has. In its 4MPX capability I was able to print beautiful 11x14 prints, but if I went higher than that the images got grainy. The high-res DSLRs can print images up to wall-size before they become grainy.

The Lumix has manual or automatic modes, and is an excellent training camera as well. You can purchase standard filters that screw onto its lens, and I recommend you experiment with them. It is too large to fit in your pocket, but few images on this site were produced with pocket cameras. Their limited (5x) zoom makes tem relatively unsuitable for this task. Finally the Lumix can be found for less than $300 on eBay, Shopping.com, or Amazon Marketplace.

A good full-feature digital camera for someone wanting to move beyond the pocket-cams is the Fujifilm Finepix S5500/S5100z , you can find it for less then $300 brand new.

Oops! I skipped a character on that link, sorry. It is fixed now.

Sometimes I wonder if the people who post threads like this ever actually come back and read them...

And actually samatar, your kinda right i kind of forgot about this thread for a while there just because of everything thats been going on lately in my daily life. but i didnt totally forget, i came back. and thanks everyone for the great ideas you gave me and all the good info thats been written.