For a specific reason, I needed two photo's taken, and I needed them on a very short notice. So, as usual, I call a guy who usually takes pictures for me if I need them, and set up an appointment to have them taken. Before the appointment was due, it was already very clear that he was going to bail on me, and later on, it proved to be true. So I had to find something else. Since I didn't knew anybody else with a decent camera, and I had the deadline within 24h, I decided I had to buy one myself. Which immediately raised the biggest question: which...

So I contacted a guy I know in the states, who I knew was a very good photographer, and had a lot of knowledge on the subject with the question "I need a cam, tomorrow, $300 max, has to be decent". That gave about as many options as Google did. After some narrowing down, and showing him a site of available models in the Netherlands, we narrowed it down to about 40 camera's, where about 10 of them were actually a bit too pricey, but could be done if there was a really good reason. I went over that list before I contacted him, but couldn't decide. Sure, I could pick the one with the best specs and the lowest price, but that's not what counts in photography. Sure, I could read a bunch of reviews on the net to find out what other people think of it, but that still doesn't cut it.

So this guy came up with a brilliant way of finding a decent camera for me: Flickr. Flickr, an image storage web2.0 app by Yahoo, stores for most of the images also the camera make and model, and indexes that, allowing you to filter on it. Long story short, after looking at end-results for camera's that fitted the criteria, he managed to find the perfect camera for me. The Fuji FinePix S5800 S800.

I bought it this morning, took the two pictures I needed, and made the deadline. I also took a lot more, and opened up a Flickr account to share my own work. I never took a photo class, I am not artistic, but you will be amazed by seeing the (mostly) beautiful results (imho!) on my Flickr photo stream. I'm very impressed with the results, especially when taking into consideration that all photo's were taken with all settings on 'AUTO', so there is room for a helluvalot of improvement once I get everything figured out.

~RW
P.S. Thanks Graham, you rock!