Hi, Everyone! I'm Columbiariverlee, although I've been down here in the Eugene, Oregon area these past 5 years. (I will be returning to the Columbia country during January, to resume my custom/antique auto and windsurfer action photo businesses I was doing when I was up there before.)
I'll be 70 this coming March, and retirement pay just ain't enough, so I'm going back to work for myself. For years I did wildlife photography as an enjoyable sideline hobby, and now I'm trying to equip myself to do some HDR panoramic scenic as I travel around in my motorhome.
So far, I have, in the past 2 months, purchased the following used equipment: Canon EOS 1D Mark II camera, 28-90mm EF USM lens, 70-300MM EF IS USM Telephoto, TWO NE2 battery chargers (No longer available from Canon, and they were selling them at $574 each!, and a total of four batteries for the camera Now selling around $125 each on Ebay. Also found a Velbon Stratos 4470 tripod in like-new condition at St. Vinnie's Thrift Store for less than $12 with my senior discount, missing only the Quick connect plate, which I found on Ebay for $14, so for around $25 I have a good, stable tripod for this dinosaur of a Canon (feels like it weighs 8-10 pounds with the battery installed!) Actually, I LIKE the weight and SIZE of the rig, having been so used to the old film Canon F1's I used for years, Brass-bodied,250 exposure backs that you loaded with 33' of bulk 35mm film, servo EE viewfinders that weighed a good pound by themselves, and the MD or MF motor drives (MF was a side grip, like current cameras, MD was an under the camera broomstick-like grip!) either one weighed 3-4 pounds, I think. Put all of it together, and you had to have been talking (Especially with the 85-300mm FD L series telephoto lens hanging off the front) a good 12-15 pounds of hardware, but I was a lot stronger back then, and frequently used the rig steadily all day long shooting car and motorcycle races at Riverside, Sears Point, and the Long Beach Grand Prix.
I switched over from film to digital in 2000. I've been shooting film (and developing and printing b&w and color prints) since starting out with an old Exacta VXbIIa in 1959, and (especially since megapixels have dropped so much in price) think digital is the best thing since bubblegum! I've been learning PhotoShop since 1995 (ver. 5.5), and now use CS3 extended version, and LOVE doing in a few seconds what used to take 20 minutes to accomplish in a smelly, sweaty darkroom. Don't have to buy film, pay and wait for processing, and get to see results as soon as I shoot. (None of you that never had to maintain a +/- 1/4degree temperature tolerance between the 12 chemical tanks used for Kodak's C22 color processing Has any IDEA how great digital is!)