I am looking at buying a digital back SLR and was interested in any expereinces with the Pentax *ist DL and any other recomendations you all may have.
My photography goes back 20 plus years. Though I won several awards in high school, including a sponsorship from Ilford, and had pretty consistent free lance work through my mid twenties (thtough mostly lower dollar sub contract stuff), my shooting and darkroom efforts have been pretty inconsistent in the past 10 years or so. I just found myself spending too much time in the laboratory to enjoy the dark room as I once had. Most of my work has been B&W, cityscapes/landscapes, so the lack of dark room motivation has been a real problem (though, I must say that my best stuff has been done in the last ten years in short bursts of fervrent activity).
A while back I purchased a Cannon A540 (4 megapixal) for ebay use. The camera has a manual mode that allows one to set ISO, white balance and other parameters. After the birth of my daughter I found myself using this mode amost exclusively for indor shots whth soft, indirect natural light (mixed with incandescent and flourescent and the occasional fash). Though the camera is actually quite decent in indirect light outside with the automated settings (ISO 50), it is not at nice at higher ISO settings (200 and 400), and falls short in uneven lighting situation (direct and indirect lighting sources), where shadows and highlights become burned or washed out.
Anyway, with all the pics I am no taking of my daughter, I want a new camera. I will probably never use it for landscapes (at least not B&W) for I have a Roliflex. I was thinking about the Pentax because I have a MX body with several lenses, filters, ect..., and I wanted to know if anyone had any comments. I have never been a Nikon fan (not all of that is objective), but could be swayed if there was a convincing argument for the D50 or others, though everything that I have read does not suggest such.
Thanks,
Rodney