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Happy birthday to me!

Well, today I'm 36 years old. I celebrated with a long quiet drive from Durham to Goldsboro, a nice Japanese dinner ... and a little shopping.

A few years ago I went from a Nikon F3 and a Hasselblad 500CM to a Kodak point-and-shoot digital (a DC260). I left the high-end gear behind because I just wasn't spending enough time in the darkroom to justify having the stuff and I wanted to experiment a bit with digital.

The DC260 is an okay camera, but after using relatively nice gear I was always a little frustrated with the slow response time of the shutter, the poorly placed flash and some objectionable lens flare.

What I really wanted was the digital equivalent of my old darkroom — a nice printer, a digital SLR camera and image processing software. I waited to think about what I really wanted and for prices to come down.

Today, after a lot of thought, I've made the jump into a full digital darkroom (less the full version of Photoshop, I'll get the upgrade the next time I'm in Durham).

My printer is the HP Photosmart 7960. Without going really crazy, this seems to be the best inkjet photo printer on the market. It can handle a wide variety of paper sizes and works well with my Mac OS X laptop. The printer has a high resolution and uses eight different ink colors to better capture a wide range of grayscale and color tones.

So far I'm happy with the purchase.

My camera is a Canon Digital Rebel, which is the first decent, affordable digital SLR I've seen hit the market. The Nikon D100 is also a nice camera, but it is several hundred dollars more expensive. The camera has a CMOS capture chip with a resolution of 3072x2048, and it can capture in RAW mode and comes with Mac OS X software to browse the images and convert RAW to TIFF or JPG.

My only complaint with the camera is that there is no PC flash sync port, and I have a large flash that uses one. But it shouldn't be too much trouble to get a hot-shoe adaptor.

The software I'm using right now is Adobe's Photoshop Elements, which came bundled with the camera. This is version 2, so it is Mac OS X native and is a lot like Photoshop, only with the menus rearranged.

At first glance I also note that Elements is missing 16-bit image support, CMYK support, and the curves tool. But I've got an old copy of Photoshop, so I will probably upgrade that.

The image next to this entry is a Detex-Newman watchman's clock dating from the 1960s. The image was shot with the Digital Rebel handheld in available light.

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