Brian Perry
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- May 6, 1999
- Messages
- 2,807
When our son turned one, we had some nice black and white studio photos taken by our wedding photographer. The pictures turned out great and I have a couple in my office at work as well as some larger (12 x 16?) prints at home. The whole thing cost about $800.
Now that our daughter is closing in on her first birthday, I am thinking about alternatives to dropping another $800 on the same thing (without trying to shortchange her). The two alternatives are:
1. Buying a digital rig like the new Nikon D70 (which everyone seems to give high marks) and taking the pictures myself. The advantages are that I can take hundreds or thousands of "free" pictures until I find some that are suitable for printing/framing, and while it will cost more than $800 overall (more like $1300), I'll have a nice camera when it's all over. The downside is that as nice as the D70 is, digital camera technology is advancing so rapidly I would be concerned about Canon coming out with something much better in three months.
2. Buying a used Medium Format camera. After spending some time at Ken Rockwell's website (his pictures are so cool!) and learning about what's really important about photography and equipment, I'm tempted to tinker with the larger format. It's resolution is leaps and bounds above 35mm, which itself is still superior to digital (in many peoples' eyes). I could buy a used Yashica or Mamiya camera setup on eBay for a few hundred (or more), spend another couple hundred on film and processing, and potentially have better results than I could with the D70. The obvious fear is that I don't know what I'm doing and it may take a while for me to be able to take any worthwhile shots. Plus, those cameras don't have the nice features we've come to expect such as auto film loading, computerized exposure, autofocus, etc.
So if it were you, would you buy a camera in the hopes of taking the pictures yourself or just pay the pro? (By the way, I do have a plain vanilla 3.3 megapixel camera for all-purpose snapshots.)
Now that our daughter is closing in on her first birthday, I am thinking about alternatives to dropping another $800 on the same thing (without trying to shortchange her). The two alternatives are:
1. Buying a digital rig like the new Nikon D70 (which everyone seems to give high marks) and taking the pictures myself. The advantages are that I can take hundreds or thousands of "free" pictures until I find some that are suitable for printing/framing, and while it will cost more than $800 overall (more like $1300), I'll have a nice camera when it's all over. The downside is that as nice as the D70 is, digital camera technology is advancing so rapidly I would be concerned about Canon coming out with something much better in three months.
2. Buying a used Medium Format camera. After spending some time at Ken Rockwell's website (his pictures are so cool!) and learning about what's really important about photography and equipment, I'm tempted to tinker with the larger format. It's resolution is leaps and bounds above 35mm, which itself is still superior to digital (in many peoples' eyes). I could buy a used Yashica or Mamiya camera setup on eBay for a few hundred (or more), spend another couple hundred on film and processing, and potentially have better results than I could with the D70. The obvious fear is that I don't know what I'm doing and it may take a while for me to be able to take any worthwhile shots. Plus, those cameras don't have the nice features we've come to expect such as auto film loading, computerized exposure, autofocus, etc.
So if it were you, would you buy a camera in the hopes of taking the pictures yourself or just pay the pro? (By the way, I do have a plain vanilla 3.3 megapixel camera for all-purpose snapshots.)