In the film days being a school boy I first bought an East German camera: the Praktica MTL-5B with a Pentacon 50mm lens. It was an f/1.8 lens, so nothing to be ashamed about!I also got a 55-200 Sigma zoomlens with it. It really wasn't bad to start with. I just couldn't afford an upmarket European or Japanese camera.
After a couple of years, and having a steady job I could upgrade to the Minolta 7000 with a 28-85mm kit lens. Autofocus, woohoo!!!!! Minolta did that with the AF-motor in the body that drove a shaft in the lens which moved the lens parts. So autofocus wasn't really fast... I got myself a Tokina 70-210mm lens too.
Another couple of years later I convinced myself (easy) and my wife (not so easy) that I positively
needed to upgrade the camera body. So I bought a Minolta Dynax 7Xi. Looking back, I must've been mad. The marketing of that camera was that you got the basic camera and neede to purchase additional chipcards for extra features like multiple exposures etc. Needless to say that these cards were hugely expensive! I have made some pretty awesome photos (in my own opinion) with it but slowly but surely my SLR's faded to the background. Especially because of the appearance of affordable digital compact cameras.
Only, there's a couple of things you just couldn't do with those compacts: sports/action/aviation and photographing with low light. For the first the AF wasn't fast enough and the shutter lag was too long. In the second case you got noise from the sensor that almost looked psychedelic.
So, after looking around I decided to buy a DSLR; the Nikon D80 with the 18-200mm zoom that sported VR - Vibration Reduction.
Happily shooting about with that combo for a year or four, I started looking for a meaningful upgrade. Usually the most meaningful upgrade is the glass; lenses. So I got myself some high-end zooms; the 24-70mm f/2.8 and the 70-200mm f/2.8 VR II. Both lenses are optically much better than the 18-200mm "convenience-zoom" and they get more light to the AF-sensors, so the AF is apt to be faster and more accurate, especially in ah... European weather.
Only.... The D80 was showing the age of it's sensor next to it's younger kin, so I couldn't resist upgrading the body too..... That became the Nikon D7000, the "grandson" of the D80.
I gave my D80 to my eldest son and he's happily snapping away with it!
There is a drawback to the D7000; the buffer is small so if you're using the "continuous" mode while shooting sports or aviation, it'll slow down and start stuttering because it first has to write some photo's to the card before it can take new ones to fill the buffer.
So now two years after obtaining the D7000 it's complemented with the Nikon D800 full-frame camera and the new version Nikkor 80-400mm lens.
Bring on the Big Gun:
Which BTW, yields results like these:
This year I decided that my 10-year old was long enough enthousiastic with an old compact so I got him a 2nd-hand Nikon D60.
BTW; I took the pics of the cameras quickly and rather sloppy: with such a big aperture that the Depth-Of-Field is waaaay too shallow! I you look carefully, you'll see that the photo is in focus, only the front and back aren't because of the shallow DoF!
As for taking pics of my models; in the Praktica days I used rings between the body and the 50mm lens. Nowadays I use the D7000 with the 24-70 or with my Sigma 105mm Macro. The D7000 is a better camera for this task than the D800 because it's smaller sensor makes that I can use a somewhat bigger aperture than with the D800. Of course I have the camera on a tripod when shooting and use an IR remote.
Cheers,
Erik.