Honestly writing here, this is my main camera. I love the flexibility and capability of a single lens reflex camera. You get exactly what you see in the viewfinder (especially using the depth of field preview), unlike the Twin Reflex and the Rangefinder, and you have a lot more options when it comes to using different lenses. Everyone develops different preferences for different lenses – they’re like the paintbrushes of your camera, and an SLR will allow you to experience the whole gamut. Lenses can be quite expensive, so if you’re considering what kind of SLR to get, and you have an uncle who’s willing to give you a whole set of old Canon lens, then get a Canon. If all your friends have Nikons and you guys trust each other enough to do swaps once and awhile, get a Nikon. One Nikkor Nikon lens will work with any Nikon camera.

There was a time when one could get this Nikon N80 for around $150 on Amazon as not exactly new, but refurbished and in perfect condition. That’s how I got my Nikon N80 with a 28-80mm lens (that means a wide angle with a zoom to a short telephoto). I was ecstatic. It was my first modern camera. (I had been using a Pentax K1000 prior to that.) And I was even happier when I made the small investment of a 50mm f/1.8D Nikkor Lens This lens is also for a 35mm Nikon, don’t let the D in its name fool you. In fact, a 50mm lens works out much better with a film camera, as digital cameras interact differently with focal lengths, rendering a 50mm lens, a lens which is supposed to mimic the focal length of the human eye, as a 75mm lens. In other words, a 50mm lens on a digital camera is a short telephoto lens. But what’s truly great about this lens is that it opens up wide, gives you a great big aperture to play with depth of field and bokeh, while being reasonably priced. A similar lens that, the f/1.4D , is more than twice the price (But it must be a dream too!).

So with this lens and this Nikon N80, I’m a happy photographer. The N80 is fully automatic if you want it to be, but so simply manual as well. I always have it on M mode, and turn auto-focus off (it saves the battery considerably and allows me to play around with the lens as I’m composing). There’s a nice depth of field preview button on the front of the body. There are great settings for doing multiple exposures on a single frame too: a multi-exposure setting and an exposure compensation feature that you can preset before doing multiple exposures so as not to overexpose the frame.