Equipment
Digital:
I do most of my photography with a Canon S110 Digital Elph which is
always at my side. The Elph sacrifices lens quality, resolution,
focussing reliability, and manual control to gain tremendous
portability and convenience. It weighs 8 ounces and is definitely
pocket-size. Having the camera with me all the time has led to many
shots I'd never have taken, and in the 18 months I've owned it I've
put 17,000 exposures on the frame counter.
If I were in the market for a new digicam, I'd look for a lens with
less spherical abberation, a sensor with more pixels (and ideally the
Foveon X3 technology), and perhaps an uncompressed storage-format
option. I'm not sure how the new 3 megapixel Elph fares in the
abberation department, but I know someone who has recently bought one
and look forward to finding out.
Current digital SLRs seem way too expensive for their capabilities
versus film SLRs right now. Once there are more, and more cheaply
available, full-frame models, and hopefully a full-frame X3-sensor
model, I'm likely to change my mind.
Film:
When explicitly going out to shoot pictures I often carry a Canon T-90
35mm film SLR -- the last and most advanced manual-focus SLR Canon
made. It has a truly addictive multi-spot metering mode and is well
designed and built. The only major fault I find in the design is the
large amount of noise the motor drive and shutter mechanism make.
High quality Canon FD lenses are readily available used nowadays
making manual focus seem even like a sort of advantage.
Lenses I carry usually include a 50/1.4, 20-35/3.5, and 135/2.8.
Sometimes I also carry a 200/2.8 or various others depending upon my
plans. As you can tell, I like fast primes. I aspire to someday own
a 135/2.0, 24/2.0, 200/1.8, and 300/2.8. *grin*
Scanning:
Sadly, I've been disappointed with the film scanners I've worked with
so far to transfer the images into my computer. The most recent
scanner I used (rented for a weekend) was a Kodak RFS3600. The
quality of the scans was reasonable, but the software was buggy and
unable to do more than a dozen or so 3600 dpi scans before crashing.
(despite my using the latest drivers and firmware) The only solution
was to reboot the computer every 10-15 scans -- pretty inconvenient
for a scanner designed to feed whole uncut rolls of film!