Photography is not the technological aid of capturing whatever your eyes see; it is the art of expressing your own vision of the world, of blending technique, light and color to draw attention to things that make your heart stop and your mind race.

A good photo will tell a story in itself, will make people relate to it and tingle all over with feelings they didn’t know they had. If you are serious about going down this road, go that extra mile of making even your family photos tell silent stories to anyone seeing them.

By buying a more expensive camera, you will not automatically get the talent of inducing drama, joy, tears or hope into people’s hearts.

Also, everyone’s a critic. Some people can’t even use a point&shoot camera, but boy, aren’t they full of oppinions about other people’s work! Don’t take offense, see what they have to say, ask what they do like and what they’d do differently. Take advice constructively, learn from common mistakes and practice, practice, practice. Re-do some of your work every couple of years, just to see what you’d do differently and how much did your experience grow.

Probably the biggest investment after buying a dSLR should be in the TIME to go out to practice and take those jaw-dropping shots. Good shots rarely find you; usually, you have to work to find them, fine-tune them, create them. You don’t need exotic places; there’s beauty hidden in ordinary things, waiting to be unveiled. Take your time; I know professional photographers which pick 2-3 photos worth saving out of 100 shots captured on camera.

Once you step into the dSLR market, you will notice that owners here are far more polarized around their favorite brands. Some will swear by Canon, while others wouldn’t touch anything other than Nikon (and nothing made outside Japan, God forbid!). A compact group still cries for Minolta’s disappearance from the market as an independent brand, and hates Sony for taking them over, while Sony fans think it was the natural thing to do.

Another small but strong message comes from Pentax fans who divide the digital photography market in “Pentax” and “irrelevant commercial garbage.” Then comes Fuji, and Mamiya, and Hasselblad, and a long list of other brands more or less specialized, each with its own group of fans (and sometimes zealots) which, given even the hint of an opportunity, will blast their appreciation for their favorite brand and despise of anything else.

Heck, I’m sure you’ll even find a couple of guys who’ll favor Kodak above anything else because “they were the first to come up with a digital camera in the early ’70s.” That suitcase with lens and viewfinder wouldn’t be allowed as an airplane carry-on, but it is nonetheless the first digital camera in the world!

Be careful not to get in the middle of this war. Take everyone’s opinion with a grain of salt, and judge for yourself 1) what makes you happy, and 2) which manufacturer satisfies your personal needs better with its line of products. Do ask product owners of pros and cons for what they own, and learn from their experiences. But don’t allow them to choose for you.

One more thing: you’re not choosing a hammer at the hardware store! Treat the dSLR as a luxury item, like an extravagant piece of jewelry. It has to fit you, to make you feel good, to “click” with you, to become a natural extension of your senses. Go out and try all cameras you can find in showrooms, make a list of likes and dislikes, then come back and learn online what you should expect from each one.

You’re going to spend quite a bit on accessories. You could get several bags: a compact one (a slingshot, maybe?) for light travelling and shooting as you walk; a bigger one, to fit a few lenses and filters, when you’ll have time to plan a shot more thoroughly. You may want to get a bag that fits your laptop, too.

For travelling or carrying your gear for extended periods of time, you may want to purchase a vest or belt to hang your gear on, and a soft neck/shoulder strap. Nothing kills inspiration and good shots than physical fatigue in your muscles.

You’ll need a lens cleaning cloth and fluid, and an air pump. Given the nature of dSLR cameras, you will get some dust or, God forbid, sand inside the camera, stuck to your sensor. It’s not a question of “if,” but “when.”

Filters: the minimum are an ultraviolet light filter as a fingerprint protection, and a circular polarizer for nature/sky/water/car show shots. You may want to get these in various sizes for each of your lenses, or get big ones with step-up adapter rings; your choice.

Then comes everything else: supplemental batteries, possibly a grip for better handling of portrait shots, memory cards, a memory card reader, external flash, mini-tripod or monopod, a foldable reflective screen. Studio photography has its own long list, starting with flashes, stands, umbrellas, softboxes, backdrops…

Lots of dough invested in accessories — plan your expenses smart.

Normally, a good zoom lens won’t exceed a 3-4x zoom (max focal length / min focal length). That’s because zoom lenses make a compromise between zoom range, physical dimensions, image quality, and price. Very long zooms (18-200mm, for instance) have poor image results and varied results depending on the chosen focal length.

The “brightness” of the lens is also important if you want to take good shots in poor lighting conditions. It’s better to get a brighter lens than a dark one which compensates with image stabilisation. There are other factors you’ll want to take into account - sharpness, purple fringing, distorsions, bokeh, even size and weight.

Depending on the kind of photography you’re into, you will eventually have an assortment of lenses. You may have a 50mm prime for portraits, another prime (60mm or more) for macro photography, a wide angle for landscapes and city tours, a super tele for wild animals, a decent superzoom for most needs when travelling light. For travelling, there’s always the compromise of what you want to photograph and what you can carry with you.

Lenses are also the most valuable pieces in a dSLR photographer’s kit. If you are serious into photography, in a matter of months or years you’re going to own an assortment of various lenses for different uses, and keep them for many years while exchanging several camera bodies. It pays to know what kind of photography you want to do, what kind of lenses you need, and invest properly from the beginning.

The “kit” lens is a decent piece of equipment and a good start, but soon enough You’ll probably want to get some prime lenses as well - fixed focus, no zoom; these will bring out the best image quality you can get.

There is no direct relationship between what kind of camera you own and the success of your photos. You could trade a brand spankin’ new Bugatti for state of the art, bleeding edge professional photo equipment, and still get bad photos.

There are famous artists whose outstanding works are studied in art majors, although they never owned anything than a basic film camera with a manual 50mm lens; yet they took brilliant photos with it.

(Actually, one of the stages of a learning photographer is to stick to a single lens for a while and see what he or she can make out of it, to learn to SEE and use what is available.)

Having a piece of high performance technology in your hand helps you make better decisions, but doesn’t do the thinking and seeing for you. Ultimately it’s you who takes the picture and have to get everything right. You are the one who must see something worth photographing, and think about composition and light. The camera just takes the shot.

It really makes no difference if you’ve got a camera phone or the most praised camera of the year if you continue to make the most common mistakes of amateur photographers. Fine, I’ll admit it - that great dSLR camera you had your eyes on will show much sharper and in more vibrant colors your poorly framed and composed, badly timed, wrongly focused shot. Although the outcome may be technologically better, the photo is still crap and not worth displaying even in your own bathroom.

SLR revolves around the strength in bigger, higher quality lens. dSLR takes this a step further to enhance the result with a large, high-sensitivity and low-noise sensor, and powerful image processing.

A compact camera takes excellent photos with very little effort. When the average amateur photographer moves to a dSLR, they notice a sudden drop in successful photos, caused by the more sensitive optical components. With dSLR, you can get out of focus images much easier, you’ll have a shorter depth of field (objects at a distance from the point of focus are blurred more than with a compact camera), you’ll miss lots of shots because of the extra settings you need to adjust.

In other words, the strength points of the dSLR are far less forgiving with an amateur photographer than a compact camera. The tiniest mistake will show up badly.

If you plan to take photos in “Auto” mode with a dSLR, then this is going to be a very bad investment for you. If you just want to get great photos easily, stick with a compact camera. Its smaller lens and sensor is far more tolerant to mistakes, misfocus, bad light. A compact camera may even accomodate a long zoom.

And don’t fall for the marketing messages claiming a dSLR to be as easy as point-and-shoot. They’re not. By design, they are specialized tools targeting experienced photographers, giving the power of taking an artistic shot back to the human instead of making it a no-brainer click with the help of computer chips.

It’s about time I dedicated this hobby its own section on my blog. And, to get started, every day in the next week you will find here a series of opinions to give beginners some oversight to dSLR photography.

I originally posted these tips on a discussion forum answering exactly the newbie’s question, “which dSLR should I buy?” I broken them down in a logical sequence and made some additions.

Enjoy — catch you again in a few hours!

But one thing drives me bonkers: one came with a 24x CDROM drive, and the other with a flimsy 8x CDRW drive. With the omnipresence of DVDs, these are annoyingly limited for reading and writing optical media.

Option 1: Purchase an external drive. A fair option I actually considered, however it would require a fully functional USB2 or FireWire port. The laptop has only one USB 1.1 port, and the extra CardBus USB2 controller is not very reliable for intensive data transfers.

Option 2: Purchase a DVD-RW drive from Dell. Not only these drives are expensive, but also very difficult to find. Over the years, Dell changed the removable tray format, so there’s no way I could find a brand new DVD-RW drive for the ancient Latitude C600-series laptop model.

Option 3: Purchase a standard slim DVD-RW drive and replace the existing drive in the plastic caddy. I managed to find a Pioneer slim DVD-RW drive for a very reasonable price (30€ give or take) which arrived in the mail today.

It was immediately obvious that the new drive won’t fit. Its front bezel is flat and square, unlike the extruded, rounded-corners bezel of the existing drives. It was also slightly wider, only by one or two millimeters, but enough not to fit through the hole in the caddy. The bezels from the old drives didn’t match the button position, nor did the clips securing them to the drive tray.

I decided that, instead of trimming the excess from the new drive’s plastic bezel, I could file off the caddy to make room for the new drive. This was a fairly easy job and didn’t take more than 10 minutes of carefully filing the plastic, beveling the edges and cleaning everything.

So, here’s the story of modding the Dell Latitude C610 CDROM tray to fit a standard slim DVDROM drive, in pictures.

The original drive in its caddy:

Note the rounded corners of the drive bezel:

New drive on top of the old drive, removed from caddy. See how the original bezel is shorter with two millimeters at the right?

After using a file to make room for the new bezel, this is what the modded caddy looks compared to the original:

Detail on the filed corners - not an extremely pleasant result, but it’s functional:

Mounting the original connector to the new drive:

Mounting the new drive into the modded caddy - perfect fit:

Caddy fully assembled, ready to be inserted back into the laptop. Miniature screwdriver on top was a must have tool for working with the tiny screws.

Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated!

I have never seen so many unexpected restarts and problems. I have gone through all the distributions — FreeNAS, ClarkConnect, OpenFiler — and ended up pulling hair with despair. Nothing worked, and the symptoms made no sense at all.

So, filled with hope for putting an end to this journey, I went back to installing Windows. It worked just fine before, so I should be thankful for having a solution, right?

Wrong. Windows was acting up just like the Linux and BSD distributions did. It installed and ran flawlessly. But if I dared turning it off during a weekend out of town, it wouldn’t start up again. It would reboot at some point before the GUI was initialized, then go in safe mode which didn’t work either, and so on. Can you imagine the frustration built up in so many hours of trial-and-error debugging, without getting anywhere?

At this point I am convinced it’s some hardware flaw. After all, this old Dell has lived a rich, long life; it’s time something gave in. Could be graphics mode, could be the interrupt table, power lines, fishy drivers, the need for a display or keyboard, another swollen capacitor… Frankly, I don’t care anymore. It’s been fun, but you gotta know when to draw the line.

So I’m again left without a file server. But not for long: one thing led to another and I ended up buying the core components of a new PC — motherboard, processor, cooler and memory. The new configuration was meant to be a testbed for a video surveillance system; video capture card is very picky about the hardware it runs on and must be tested first. The test was postponed, so I am now the proud owner of a top-knotch motherboard and low-power processor with a monster passive cooler. It’s so much more powerful than the old system, more versatile, and dead quiet — joy to my ears. Old hardware? That’ll be my file server, after the winter holidays.

Now, the question is, should I go back to square one and try out all those distributions, or just throw in Windows and enjoy the afternoon with the lads at the pub?