I'm a self-described freelance photojournalist with a strong bent towards emergency services documentary work. When I'm shooting for fun, I tend to look for interesting and/or unique landscapes, both urban and natural. One of the most enduring overall themes to my photography is the interplay of light, color, cloud, and shadow (there is a much better example available) at all times of the day, but particularly at sunset, a habit I suspect I picked up living in southern Alberta where it's hard to beat the way the skies look as the sun drops below the mountains.
Other interesting themes include isolation, solitude, and loss; I've recently embarked on a project to document Canadian attitudes about their country and the society they live in, recognizing the isolation that comes with an inherently diverse world. I also seem to end up shooting a lot of cemeteries -- I realized I loved the look and feel after dragging an EF 70-200/2.8 lens around Arlington National Cemetery in Washington and putting a half-dozen rolls of Tri-X through my system. If nothing else, I make it a point to visit cemeteries whenever possible, although I have never photographed my local burial sites.
I do most of my photojournalism-type work with a Canon EOS 50E, also known as the Elan IIe. There are several lenses I own and use on a regular basis, although I seem to particularly enjoy the cheap 50mm perspective most of all. If not that, then I've got a dirt-cheap consumer-grade zoom lens that stays mounted most of the time. My more professional photographer friends laugh at me for carrying such a cheap piece of junk, but I know how to get decent results out of my equipment, and non-photographer friends don't complain.
I bought the EOS mostly on a gut decision. I had been looking seriously at Nikon, but liked the way the EOS felt in my hands, and after four and a half years with the system, I'm at the point where every other 35mm camera interface feels like crap. It's difficult to explain why; I suspect it's because the EOS interface feels more intuitive than the others. People looking to buy into a whizzy SLR system these days would do well to take a look at the mid-range EOS gear and see how well they like it.
Two things I like about my camera in particular: Like most EOS cameras, it's possible to shift AF trigger off the shutter release on to a small button where your thumb rests while holding the camera. You have to hit two buttons to meter and focus an image, but it's nice because it turns autofocus into an explicit decision. Anyone who's ever had an AF sensor lock on to some stupid foreground or background element while trying to compose a shot knows why this is important; it pays off hugely in decisive work like sports or, more relevantly to me, fire/EMS photography.
The other great thing is eye controlled focus. The EOS 50E has three focusing points. With ECF, you only have to look at the point and it will be used for AF. This avoids having to do the shift-composition, focus-image, recompose dance; it apparently fixes bizarre flash problems too, but I don't do a lot of flash photography so I couldn't say for sure. ECF works for some people, and for some it doesn't; the latter group are likely to dismiss it as a gimmick, but I find it hugely useful. (It's also hard to over-estimate the utility of the eye-controlled DOF preview. You can have manual DOF, or a shifted AF as per above, but not both at the same time, and boy, does that ever suck.)
Serious photography involves dragging my Mamiya C330, a twin-lens reflex design available fairly cheaply on the used market. I got mine for $350 from my pal Doug at Broad Street Cameras in Victoria, and I'm incredibly happy with it.
The camera and I have embarked on a strange relationship -- I love it, but I hate the accessory junk I have to drag around with it. Like, I can't just take it out. I need to take my SLR out with me because I'm too cheap to buy a hand-held light meter. A tripod has to come along because although people say it's easy to hand-hold a TLR, I can't do it. By the time everything is said and done, I'm packing about 20 pounds of equipment, which is why I'd probably call the TLR an "outdoors studio" kind of camera, if nothing else.
It's hard to beat the quality, but after a year or so, I'm starting to find little idiosyncracies that bug me about this camera. I don't like the fact that its top shutter speed is 1/500 -- in bright sunlight and ISO 125 film, you need to be at f/16 or smaller to get to that speed, and it sucks. Yes, I could stick a neutral density filter on the front, but still. The camera has at least four interlocks, the shutter is cocked most of the time, and the lens's own release can be a bit on the sensitive side. (i.e., I'll bang the lens and have the shutter release on its own despite the fact the interlocks are set.) I hate the lack of an internal meter, and I bitch about it every opportunity I get.
Having put a couple dozen rolls of film through the system over the past few months, I've gotten used to these annoyances, though they periodically crop up to frustrate me. I find I'm having to slow down and use my brain a lot more than I used to, which is probably a good thing. 35mm photography allows you to be gung-ho and make up for quality with volume; if I'm doing portraiture in 6x6, I have twelve chances to get a good picture. Because there's no coupled meter, and it's a pain in the ass to go back to the EOS before every shot, I need to think, bracket, and think some more. Usually, I get it right.
But I don't own a digital camera.
The bottom line, right now, is that digital doesn't help me accomplish what I want. If I were doing event photojournalism and needed a way to get images into production as fast as possible, I'd run out and buy a D30 or something like that. But I'm not. I know my equipment, and I know how to get the results I want. There's some argument on photo.net that since many of us are now shooting for the Web and digital printing technology (certainly, every slide I've had printed in the past year or so has been done by scanning and then printing onto digital paper using Kodak's LED printers), we should skip the film step and produce a digital image from the beginning. I suppose I kind of agree with that sentiment, but it's hard to shake the feeling that I like the option of doing traditional printing and processing. Maybe I'm just being difficult; I don't know. I don't see the need to own a digital camera right now, so I don't.
My other problem with digital photography is that nobody seems to have solved the storage issue. I like coming home from a trip and dumping a bag of film at the lab, then sitting in the dark a few days later sorting through the good and bad images, preparing to scan them, etc.; I don't think I'd enjoy photgraphy quite as much if I had to edit in real time (i.e., every night back at the hotel). To get my decidedly non-digital images on to the Web, I bought an Acer 620UT scanner. This is pretty much the cheapest scanner you can buy that will do transparancies and negatives, or at least it was when I bought it in the summer of 2000. Now that I've figured out a lot of its quirks, I'm semi-happy with it. It does a fairly good job with medium format originals; the defects you see in most of the scans are the result of my incompetent tweaking in Photoshop (scaling, downsampling, contrast, that kind of thing).