For photography I use mainly analogue cameras. The quality of the films is still surpassing affordable digital alternatives. For normal holliday snapshots, it doesn't really matter, but if you want to do some serious photography, traditional cameras have great potential. First, I will elaborate on the cameras I use for photography. Further down, is a chapter on digital cameras and how their sensors work. Why Size matters and Pixels don't count.
My cameras
As from the summer of 2008 I upgraded from my latest analogue camera to a digital one. I am the happy owner of a Fujifilm Finepix S5 Pro. Though I am a fan of old fashioned photography, the time was there to start being completely digital.The S5 Pro is sold as a 12 megapixel camera, but it has two sensors per pixel, which makes effective 6 MB pictures (in jpeg). The help of this double sensing is exactly the feature which makes the camera worth buying. It gives a high dynamic range which keeps details and textures visible even with strong dark/light contrasts. Many wedding photographers use it, but I find it usefull in city photograpphy as well. Think of mediterranean summer sun on white houses and you get the idea. The handling of skin tones is also very good. Pixel quality over pixel quantity, so to speak. For convenience I use a 18-200 nikkor zoom lens with it, covering all my distance needs in one lens. You can find example shoots on my flickr page.
An important part of digital photography is the digital darkroom. Like in the days of the real darkroom, getting the best out of an image is halfly done when taking the picture and halfly in post processing. For this there are limited serious options. Aperture and Adobe Lightroom are the most complete programs for handling a large amount of photographs. Some important image manipulation can be done with them, but sooner or later you will want to use either Adobe Photoshop or The Gimp for creating the exact effect or mood you had in mind. I have used all of these programs and can say that any of them suits the ambitious photographer. The Gimp - being for free - is recommended for anyone who wants (or can) spend litte money. For either alternative there are loads of tutorials.
I did most of my photos before with the Canon T90 (see below). Previously I worked with a Canon FTb and AT1. These models are pretty old, but they make great pictures. As for lenses, I have a 28, a 35 - 70, a 135 and a 200 mm lens. The 200 is very heavy, but has the advantage of giving perfect, unaffected corners. The 35 - 70 mm lens is ideal for city photographs. The 28 solved many 'too close to shoot' problems and gives a nice enhanced circular effect in some cases. The 135 is a very convenient one in many circumstances and, because of its lesser weight compared to the 200, holds stabler in low light conditions.
Most of my camera equipment is donated by (/borrowed from) my father, who is active member of my home town's photographers club. So the Canon T90 used to be his, long time ago.
I tend to carry around a camera of some sort most of the time. Since the T90 equipment is big and heavy, I also use my mobile to make some snapshots (A Sony-Erickson w800i, with 2 Mpixel camera and 4.8 mm lens). In addition, quite a few pictures are taken with a Nikon Coolpix 4800. This Nikon is a handy, smaller camera, 4 Megapixel, with 8.3x zooming. It is fun to use and makes reasonable pictures.Nice touch is the availability of the traditional viewport, which allows putting the camera close to your eye and thus creating a stable, three point fixing of the camera, avoiding the usual shaken picture syndrome, caused by holding your arms as-far-from-the-viewscreen-as-possible of the common shapshot taker.Bad thing for both digital cameras is that they have autofocus only.
The Canon AT1 manual
The Canon T90 was buildt in the 1980's and was a camera far ahead of its time. It got lots of programmable features and was so complete that Canon actually disabled some features in other models by commenting some lines in the code.
I am not particulary fond of the weight of the camera, especially in combination with the heavy lenses. I read that some camera manufacturers put extra ballast in cameras to make them feel more professional. Whoever thinks a camera should have a certain weight to feel stable? But when I take a look at the great pictures it can take, I forget these little annoyances. Considering it is mostly electronic and very old, it is remarkable that the program still works perfect, but then, it is not running windows.
The Canon T90 manual (pdf)
The Veha 2 pocket camera
Here's a nice little camera I dug up in Ukraine. The Veha 2 was made in Kyiv between 1961 and 1964. It seems still fully functional and there might even be a film inside, but I'l have to check that. It does have beach sand at least, but otherwise looks ok.
Digital photography
Any review on digital photography is bound to be outdated when written, so the following may not be up to date. Nevertheless, it gives something to think about.
Digital photography has the advantage of being faster in image processing and giving the possibility of carrying around smaller cameras.There are, however some serious drawbacks for many types of dital cameras. To understand a bit more about this, let me explain more on the technical background of digital photography.
The most important item in a digital camera is the sensor, that replaces the conventional film. The size and quality of the sensor may differ between different brands. The following image shows the size of various sensors, compared to 24x36 mm film. (Click on image to enlarge)
What is visible immediately, is that digital sensors are smaller. Thus, all your old lenses won't be good enough for these cameras. Salesmen will tell you that your old things will fit - that is true - but they will not resize the image smaller than what they are made for. Parts of the image will be lost.
The leftmost image is a conventional film of 24x36 mm. Its pixel size is 72 square micrometer, although it is better to speak of irregularily shaped 'grains' rather than pixels. The resolution can be regarded as 12 Megapixel and noise is virtually absent. This is the standard that digital cameras at least have to meet.
The second image is a 3 Megapixel sensor. Pixels are 12 square micrometer big, with a distance of 3.5 micrometer between them. It is easy to see that the sensor is much smaller than normal film. The pixels are put in high density onto the sensor and thus it is recording lots of noise together with your image. With good other cameraparts, however, one could still make a photograph with big signal to noise ratio.
The third image depicts an 8 Megapixel sensor, slightly bigger than a 3 Mpx sensor, but with a much larger pixel density. The pixels are 7 square micrometer and lie 2.7 micrometer apart. This seems an improvement on the 3 Megapixel camera, but in reality it is worse. This leads to a higher amount of noise recording and with some cameras it can even be seen with the naked eye.
The rightmost sensor is a from a Nikon 6 Megapixel digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera. The pixel surface is 61 square micrometer - twice as much as the 8 Mpx sensor - and also the distance between the pixels is bigger (7.8 micrometer). The noise levels of this type of sensor are minimal and comparable to analogue cameras. This comes with a price tag.
Not only the size of the sensor differs, but also the quality. There are basically three sensor types as shown in the following picture. (click to enlarge)
The Foveon sensor is the one that comes closest to original analogue film, not needing any fancy interpolation to get an image, but is only used by Sigma. Most companies have committed themselves to a certain sensor, often internally develloped, and are therefore not inclined to switch to a better other sensor, but keep working on their own.
An improvement in the sensor field comes from Canon, by introducing the first 24x36 mm sensor with 12 to 16 megapixel. It includes bigger sensor pixels. Combined with the fact that background noise is now measured before the image is taken, instead of just boosting the signal artificially, the image is less noisy. According to Canon, the quality of the image is better than that of a 100 ISO slide film. Such innovation shows that the digital camera is far from being developed completely.