[Alex1994]

When it comes to photography, I am a film man. Film, and the cameras you load it into, taught me photography and continue teaching it to me. Like so many photographers, professional and amateur, I learned all about aperture, depth of field, exposure, shutter speed, focus, ISO, zone system on a 35mm film SLR with negative film. I continue to use such SLRs, along with compacts and rangefinders on various endeavours, always changing what rig I use depending on the assignment. To me, a rangefinder, an OM-1 or a Minox 35 are very different tools, each with characteristics that let them do some jobs better than others.

Photographers need a minimum of versatility; it is impractical to own and transport a dozen cameras, keeping each one loaded with the right sort of film etc. Keeping track of it all is a nightmare. Furthermore, each and every of my antique cameras is slow off its feet, requiring the user to input data like focus and aperture - shooting old style requires time and consideration, and every time a subject escaped me due to fiddling with the lightmeter or focussing manually, I felt frustrated.

I felt it was time for a change.

What I needed was single tool that would fulfill all my photography needs: something portable, fast, sharp, automatic, electronic and versatile. What I needed was a digital SLR.

Some eBaying later, I was the proud owned of a Canon EOS 30D body for the not-so-princely sum of £245 delivered to my door. To this I attached a Tamron 24-135mm zoom in 35mm equivalent: with the 1.6x crop factor this becomes a 35-210 or so. I also have a 50mm prime lens.

Shooting with a dSLR is very different to anything I have done before with cameras. It's certainly very fast - when you get it to do what you want. The plethora of buttons and wheels that are not assigned to do specific tasks it certainly very confusing at first, though I'm sure I'll get used to it.

2 days later I have already taken some 120 photos. Already I had discovered the machine-gun mentality of the digital shooter. It encourages the photographer into a mindset of plenty - shoot everything, bin what you don't like. I guess with film one does this as well, but digital pushes it to the extreme: 2 pictures out of my 120 were what I'd consider 'good'. The rest were good for the trashcan.

Shooting with a digital SLR gave me an inherent feeling that each frame was worthless - an ephemeral collection of ones and zeroes that cost nothing to make and nothing to get rid of, hence the giant volume of pictures I took. Did I take even the fraction of care that I would when shooting film? Did I hell - if I had, I would have ended up with more decent shots. The fact is that a dSLR makes it so easy to put it into auto mode and snap away blindly, thinking that because you have a big expensive camera the picture will automatically look good.

I decided to go togging in Reading today, with about 2 hours to burn in the town centre. I could have taken my digital SLR, coming off as an obnoxious yuppie machine-gunning away at the general populace. Instead I took my newly-restored Yashica Electro, loaded with a roll of FP4+ - quiet, subtle, manual and classy. I have yet to see the results - in fact I think the dSLR would have performed better in certain situations, giving sharper detail and more accurate focus, but then I'd have about 500 photos to sift through, mostly badly composed because I would have lazily used the zoom instead of my legs to get the subject exactly where I wanted it in the frame.

My conclusion, therefore, is that to me digital lends itself well to throwaway snapshots of things we don't care so much about and are happy to bin if we need to. This is certainly an area I need equipment for, so I won't chuck away my dSLR. Indeed, I'll use it well for the snapshots where perhaps a little more control and quality is needed than my IXUS compact. But for learning and practising photography, it's Ilford FP4, HP5 and Kodak Ektar all the way.

--Alex