Camera and Photography
by Chris

Choosing the right camera:

There is nothing worse than coming back from a great vacation just to find out that all the pictures you took are too dark, too fuzzy, or that magnificent sunset you took in that very special place is just a blurry orangish spot partly hidden by obviously dirty finger tips...
Knowing that we would probably never have the chance to go twice to all these wonderful places and that we'd have to get our best shots the first time round, we decided to take up a photography course.

Our course, taken at the Dubai Art Center, taught us the basics of photography, the general techniques, the rules of composition, how to use our material to its full potential and gave us lots of opportunity to practice our shots and have someone objectively criticize them.
Since then, we've done lots of reading in photography magazines (i.e. Practical Photography, Digital Photography, Photography made Easy, Chasseurs d'Images etc..) and some books ( I highly recommend the Lonely Planet's Travel Photography book) to get some more insights and practical tips..
Should we have had more time, I reckon we would have tried to take an advanced course, a bit more practically oriented to perfect our skills and be able to quickly catch the right photo every time (and not have to spend 10 minutes setting up the gear to the right ISO, lenses, aperture, exposure, while frustratingly seeing our subject moving away...)

Once enriched with the theoretical knowledge, we set about shopping for the best camera to take with us.
The challenge with such a trip and the countries we are going to, is that whilst you want something that takes the best pictures possible, your are constrained by the weight and volume of the camera, as well as by its attractiveness to thieves, muggers, pirates, riflers, robbers, pilferers and other low-life scumbag terrorists.
Moreover, we did not want to carry our negatives or films with us all the time and run the risk of losing/damaging them, or have them developed in one the many professional "10-minutes-is-all-that-it-takes-me-to damage-your-entire-film" shops.

We basically had two options:
1) Use a film camera: we would have to get the films developed on regular basis, and send the negatives and the developed pictures home in two different packages.
Points to consider/risks are:
- bad development
- films that get damaged in certain climate
- finding good quality films - Keeping films in good condition (as carrying our own fridge would have been somewhat cumbersome...).
- extra weight of developed pictures
- costs of postage and eventual DHL package to send home 

2) Use a digital camera: 
We would have to buy enough storage space to last us for at least 2-3 months. When in big "modernish" cities, we would have to transfer the pictures from the cards to 2 CD-ROMs (in picture shops or PC shops). 
To make sure that the pictures arrive safely, we would send a CD to both our moms (in different packages on different days from different post offices)
Points to consider/risks are:
- camera gets stolen with all pictures in it before we back it up on cd's (loss not constrained to 36 pictures!)
- storage media gets damaged
- not finding a photo-shop or PC shop that would be willing to assist us (for a reasonable fee) 
- costs of postage DHL for CD's

Having discussed the matter over a good bottle of South African Chardonnay, we set our mind on the compromise solution of an SLR-like digital camera (aka Prosumer Digital cameras) with enough manual settings and optical zoom. 

Our decision criteria were:
- Compact and light weight
- Auto as well as Manual settings (aperture, shutter, exposure lock, focus lock, flash compensation, bracketing...)
- Enough resolution to be printed to 8x10 format and enlarged if required (min 3-4 MegaPixels)
- Optical Zoom lens equivalent to 200mm or more (6x zoom).
- Accepting storage media that are widely used and cheap
- Good battery life

The first camera we bought was the Minolta Dimage 7, a 5 Megapixel digital camera with a 28-200mm lens.
While this camera had all the features we wanted and more, we re-sold it less than 1 month later mainly due to underwhelming battery life which would not have scaled for us during the trip (and also because I could not control my "ohmygodI'vebeenrippedoff" frustration when I heard that a new - improved - "Dimage 7i" model was coming out just one month later...)

We are now the proud owners of a Fuji S602 camera, a 6MP 35-210mm camera which works just fine for us, specially when augmented with the following accessories:
- 2x128MB Compact Flash
- 1x1GB Iomaga MicroDrive
- 4 sets of GP 1800mAh NImH rechargeable batteries
- Maha fast charger
- Kenko 55mm lens adaptor (to protect the retractable lens and to attach filters)
- Hoya Circular polarizing and UV-Sky (1B) filters
- Lowepro mini Z camera bag
- small flexible tripod (10cm)
- Light travel tripod with expandable legs (up to1.5m)