Photography reached its golden age at the height of the magazine boom. But now, camera firms have simplified taking pictures so much that all you need to do is point and shoot. In spite of that there are the purist, of course, who insist on using a manual camera.
But photography is an expensive hobby, even if you're not overly fussy about equipment. So what drives the amateur? For one thing, it takes him out of doors _ anywhere from the park in the neighbourhood to the distant Kaziranga wildlife sanctuary. (Hobbyists mostly leave indoor photography to the professionals.)
There's an enormous range of hardware to choose from. And when it comes to this particular art, your tool is only as good as your imagination. You can start as low as a manual camera with pre-set focus such as Fuji's latest offering that comes for Rs 850 or a Kodak KB 10 for Rs 995. Then there is Korean manufacturer Premier's camera for Rs 1,000 and in the slightly expensive range you have Kodak's KB 20 for Rs 1,895 and the Pentax PC33, compact manual camera that costs about Rs 1,700.
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If you want an automatic camera with auto-focus, choose between Canon's WP-1 for Rs 3,475 and the Kodak KE 50 available for Rs 3,495 apart from a host of others in the market.
A camera with an average wide-to-tele zoom like Canon's EOS 88 or the Pentax MZM costs about Rs 15,000.
But the keen amateur prefers the single-lens reflex or SLR camera, as does Vivek Mehra, executive director at PricewaterhouseCoopers. "With an SLR," he says, "you can adjust the focus and experiment." These are expensive and cumbersome. A fully manual SLR requires the user to load the film and set the aper-ture, shutter speed and focus.
An SLR can cost between Rs 15,500 (for a Pentax MZ 50) to Rs 25,000 (for a Canon EOS 500 N Kit). If you want to go in for a high-end Nikon F3, be prepared to shell out about Rs 35,000 in the gray market. (A note about price: There really aren't any bad cameras out there. It's just that cost rises in proportion to component quality.)
Mehra, who has a Nikon SLR and a Pentax automatic, proposes a middle path: "These days people use automatic cameras that a