Getting the best gift ever....again!

The best gift ever, part one:
In the summer of 1995, my Aunt Jen and Uncle Pete gave me what became my very favorite of all my high-school graduation gifts. As I opened the gift, at first all I knew was I was getting my first "real" camera. You can see me opening the camera cover and lens care kit in this snapshot; the box with the camera body is barely visible in the frame, bottom right.

The camera Aunt Jen chose for me was a Pentax K1000, which I was soon to learn was the renowned "workhorse" of sturdy, solid 35-mm manual-everything cameras. The only thing on it that required a battery was a through-the-lens light meter, and its long-lasting battery required only one replacement in my long relationship with that camera. With some practice, I learned the basics of manual focus, aperture, shutter control, and using available light instead of relying on flash. Though I never learned wet darkroom techniques, I played around with shooting both color and black-and-white film, and have had quite a lot of fun with that Pentax.

Things changed, as they always do. Throughout graduate school and early adulthood, I moved several times; physical "things" became more inconvenient at the same time that prices for their digital counterparts began to fall. I began to rely more and more on digital media for everything. No longer content to relegate my pictures to shoeboxes under the bed and physical albums collecting dust, I started to avoid shooting film (at first without noticing the insidious digital slide), not just because of the processing fees, but because more and more I was enjoying the ability to do my own "digital darkroom" tweaks and desktop publishing from my point-and-shoot digital camera.

And yet... I missed the ability to choose how I wanted to focus a shot, without scrolling through endless "soft menus" and having a camera eat batteries like tic-tacs.

The best gift ever, part two:
During the holiday season of 2008, it finally happened. My wonderful husband looked at me and said: "I don't know what you want for a gift." I put down the book on digital photography I had been longingly leafing through and sighed: "What I really want is a digital, single-lens reflex camera." He blinked, shook his head slightly in disbelief, and said, "Really? You know what you want? You want a camera?" I showed him the book, which had diagrams of cameras, sample pictures each model could take, and specs. The prices were easily four times what we could possibly afford. Fortunately, the copyright date was about 4 years old.

So the story has a happy ending. As had happened when I was in graduate school, prices for digital cameras had come down, this time for the digital SLR's, both prosumer models and the true-pro models. A local retailer was able to set us up with a Pentax *ist, which is the best gift ever, part two.

As you can see, it makes me smile just playing around with it. Here I am at a local nature conservancy, trampling around in the ice and snow. That wonderful husband of mine took this picture with my "ol' reliable" Nikon CoolPix P2. He did a beautiful job, didn't he?