Hi  Art "Withdrawal symptoms are setting in" Bahrs:

I'm sure like many others, I learned an early lesson in pursuit of my
photographic interests. At first I thought I could save some money by buying
cheaper lenses, but I soon learned this is *not* the case. The less
expensive lenses tend to loose their focus, after which they are useless,
unless you want to take them apart and use the lenses inside to start camp
fires (which I actually did).

If you're getting a good SLR, get a good lens (or several of them). I like a
35-70mm zoom lens as it lets me frame the shot easily with the large inside
ring and focus with the smaller outside ring. The 35-70 works well for
almost all photos I take with the camera. I also have an extreme close up
lens, 1:1 and with an adapter it's a 2:1 lens - however with this one I've
found you don't focus the lens, you move the camera in or out from your
subject to focus - it's that close! Then a good 70-200mm lens comes in handy
sometimes too. The last is actually a telescope with a camera mount, which
can serve as a super telephoto lens and get great shots of the surface of
the moon and with time exposures and the automatic tracking mount of the
telescope great pictures of the rings of Saturn and even the comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashing into Jupiter.

I've been watching with interest the discussion of digital cameras, as I've
not made the switch to digital, still preferring film (usually Kodak). I've
used up to 1600 speed film for museum interiors with good results, however
1600 film is very temperature sensitive so must be handled with care and
developed shortly after exposure. I prefer color negatives as opposed to
color slide film; each have their own adherents. Film is getting somewhat
hard to find in the 100 and 200 speeds (400 is too grainy for my purposes)
and anything above 600 is very difficult to find - it's all those shutter
bugs going digital that's making life difficult for celluloid hold outs like
me.

I gave up taking pictures of weddings as I tired of people asking "when are
you going to take the picture!" - nature never complains, it just continues
doing whatever it was doing oblivious of your efforts.

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