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This cold weather has me nervous. Last year we didn’t really get much in the way of spring. It went right from the snows of winter, skipped spring and summer and went right into fall. We had one or two days of hot weather and the summer wasn’t terrible, but without a nice spring it just wasn’t satisfying.

I’d really like to be able to spend lots of time hiking around this summer. I didn’t have much opportunity the last two years. The weather is partly to blame for that, but mostly it was a general malaise that’s taken me the better part of a year to shake myself out of.

What was the reason for that malaise? Let’s not go there. There were lots of reasons, some of which I’ve alluded to in previous posts.

The other thing I’m keen to do this year is to get back into photography a bit. I was given a tired, old 35mm SLR when I was in high school, which I really enjoyed using. Particularly I enjoyed shooting in black and white and doing the development and prints myself. Unfortunately my house has absolutely no space in it for a darkroom, and as I’ve gotten older the use of those terrible chemicals has started to bother me (from a tree-hugger perspective that is). So I abandoned film photography in favor of digital photography about two years ago.

The problem is that two years ago even somewhat expensive digital cameras weren’t that good. I wanted something small enough to use in candid situations but powerful enough to make me not miss my SLR. I settled on a middle-range two megapixel camera with a 6x optical zoom. It managed to more or less exactly what I did not want. Too big to carry anywhere easily and not powerful enough to be truly useful for creative photography.

With that lesson learned and that original camera headed quickly for ebay (along with that old SLR body and lenses in still mostly working condition) a wiser course has been decided upon. When you need two cameras for two different purposes you should have two different cameras.

So with that in mind I’m breaking in a new Nikon Coolpix 2200. A nice, relatively inexpensive 2mp camera with a 3x zoom. Small enough to fit in a pocket but decent quality. And with the other cameras on their way to ebay I’ll be saving my pennies for a digital SLR. Canon and Nikon both make nice SLRs for under $1000 (still a lot, I know, but beats $6k from a few years ago). As much as I’ve liked my Nikon in the past, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to go with the Canon. It actually comes with a lens at that price (the nikon doesn’t, and my lenses are too old to fit) and gets rave reviews.