clive francis once bubbled...
It is all verywell someone telling you that walking on a boat with a nikonos v makes people get out of your way because they think you are professional (?), and telling you to go for it.
BUT how much is it?
your wife shoots 10 rolls a week, on what, is she using a manual camera or is she using a modern autofocus slr?
if she shoots slr, then she may well have problems to begin with.
shooting rolls and rolls of film on good dives and only have one photo per film that you can keep can leave you feeling very unhappy, especially if you saw a "one in a million" shot.
owning a nikonos v doesn't make you a professional photographer, there are many shots posted on here by people with that setup or similar asking what and how it went wrong, it is the quality of the photo you take that makes you professioanl!
I take it as she does the year book then she has access to film developing?
what is you budget?
Do you want to go digital?
could you get a good digital camera that has all the slr functions and a housing for a comparable cost of the nikonos v?
Price: We haven't discussed it yet...He knows I am willing to give him a reasonable price and I know he was planning on selling it on eBay just like I was going to purchase one off of eBay. I would suspect we will agree on a reasonable price based on eBay sales when (and if) I decided to buy it.
She uses a SLR Auto focus for MOST of her work, but there are those pics that she likes to take and use a manual. I understand it is a tremendous amount of work, and we have about 25 dives to decide if she wants to go through the trouble or not.
Going through rolls of film is nothing new to her also. The sell all of the unused shots at the end of the year to the student body, to help finance the cost of next years pictures. I've seen the table where they lay them all out...hard to beleive that many pictures get wasted, but thats life.
Going digital...now that is the real question...personally, I am the internet and computer geek. We don't own a digital camera (yet) mainly because I know that in 6 months something newer and better will be out for cheaper than what I just paid for.
I know digital is easy, and I do like playing with digital enhancing programs, but believe it or not, they still make the yearbooks at school the old fashioned way...very little computer imagery involved.
I am definately waiting and seeing how the liveaboard trip goes. If she likes it, we buy it. Simple as that. If she uses it for a couple of days, and loses interest, we don't. Of course, then I come back to the board and ask about housings for the SLR and perhaps digital cameras.
Thanks again for the input. I appreciate the candor and look forward to telling everyone how the trip went.