This is just a background piece to get us situated as I will occasionally post something the technical or non-technical side of photography. Most of you know that I have at times been a fairly serious amateur photographer. When I was younger I won several awards and had a scholarship to study photography. Since I left college, my output has been quite sporadic but I still have a pretty strong sense of what I like from an artistic and technology perspective.
I am more or less a Canon loyalist. The Canon-Nikon tradeoff was a matter of personal preference in the film era, but in the digital era, I think the momentum has shifted definitively to Canon. Canon has invested heavily in its proprietary sensor technology and, in my opinion, is now comfortably ahead of Nikon on the price-quality curve for digital cameras, across the spectrum from point and shoots to super-high end SLRs (single lens reflex – the ones whose lenses come off). No other firm is competitive at this point in digital SLRs, imho.
For serious work, I still shoot a 10 year old film Canon SLR, the mid-range Elan, and for fun pocket-size cameras, I have had a series of Canon Elphs.