I didn’t really need another …

DSLR, but I bought one anyway! Ok, this has got to stop. Since I cannot ride until post neck surgery I have had to take up some of  my spare time in other pursuits. The one that I enjoy most besides cycling is golf. Unfortunately if I can’t cycle I can’t play golf either. I move on to hobby number three, photography.

When I had (still have one) film SLR’s I found out rather quickly that a second body of some kind or another was nearly essential if you were really serious about your art. So I had two, actually I had three at one time, film bodies. When I finally made the move to DSLR’s I thought to myself, one is enough, after all I can always revert to my point and shoot that I carry with me when I cycle. I found out that I was wrong.

Recently I had to spend a month without my DSLR and it was very difficult to get the images I wanted to take with my little Point & Shoot. Yeah it has eight megapixels, a bunch of cool modes and such, but no matter how hard you try, it simply does not take pictures with the image quality that a DSLR and a good lens will.

Without much thought I decided I needed to buy a backup DSLR. So I looked around and thought maybe I would buy a used one. Well I looked and looked at all the available Pentax models; K10D, K100, K200, Km, etc. and came to the conclusion that I loved my K20D so much that I should just get another one. Where else would I find another camera that would not require relearning all the nuances of the sensor. Where else would I find a  camera that felt the same in my hands. Where else would I find a camera with all the controls in familiar places. It had to be another K20D. So I picked one up new from eBay, used Bing Cashback to get 8% off and eBay Bucks to get another 2% off and ended up with another K20D body for under $600.

Of course with a savings like that it did leave some money left over to pick up a new flash and additional accessories. With many local Ritz/Wolf Camera Centers closing around the country (unfortunately only three in the Charlotte area and none around here) people are rushing to the fire sale and reselling at a profit on eBay and other places. Sometimes they pass on the savings, sometimes they are trying to maximize their profits. I did manage to pick up two Pentax Remote F for under $8 shipped. and a genuine Pentax L150 battery for under $17 shipped. Other items I needed to pay more for, still got a reasonable deal on the Pentax AF-540FGZ flash at about $285. Wow I have never paid that much for a flash in my life, but it’s the top of the Pentax line and it is OEM so I guess you get what you pay for. It will work well with my Sigma EF-500 DG Super in a dual flash setup.

I guess now the next thing I need to do is learn how to take better pictures, maybe I will enroll in a class, after all what else am I going to spend my time doing.

Wishing I was out there with all of my cycling friends, maybe I should change this to the Incidental Photographer, hmmm.