My (almost) all mechanical old fashioned Nikon F3 fails to advance the film properly. Facing major service charges I am in consideration of buying a replacement. But whatever you think about cameras these days: As with anything else you end up digital. I really love this F3, it is exactly doing what it should do for good pictures, it’s like teaching you a lesson in photography. And I think that’s where my concerns for digital equipment are coming from. Digital means first of all consumer friendly: Press a button to take the picture, press a button to preview it right away, and press another button to print it out – directly through your printer. Digital means your picture is resolved in a set of data, and this set can be easily transformed and processed with almost no restriction. Whereas when you deal with a traditional 35mm film a lot of experience and knowledge with this material is necessary in order to do so. Digital is consumer friendly, 35mm not, from this point of view. This aspect doesn’t interest me too much. I remember my first camera, a Minolta 7000. One of the first auto focus cameras on the market. I was interested in learning more about film and photography soon to realize that in this respect you are very limited with a camera doing everything automatically. I hardly used any program features of the Minolta. I preferred the manual settings. It was only a logical step that I changed the equipment to a Nikon F3. And I was very happy about it. Now, should I change to digital equipment, I am facing a new challenge: what is possible with digital imaging. The last thing I would try is to do the same pictures with a digital camera as with a 35mm film camera. But that is probably what most people are doing. They can skip the film part and be there own printers and publishers. That’s the main achievement. But what does that mean? How does this change the perception of a picture? Never in the history of human culture so many pictures were taken and published as today. Just think of mobile phones with integrated camera and wireless transmission to a webpage. I am intrigued by the idea of challenging the image by digital process’ rather than just be served by the digital process.