I am totally into photography. I highly recommend a Canon brand SLR. The least expensive is the Rebel, and there are several models of the Rebel available, generally for around $600-700. I guarantee for the price they will blow you away with features, quality, etc. And a nice site to checkout is http://photo.net/ that has forums and other stuff. And http://www.dpreview.com/ which has digital camera reviews, unbiased. A tip, very very important, in fact critical. You MUST use a tripod or the photos will not be the best they can be. Get the best tripod you can afford, I recommend a ballhead for the tripod head. And a cable release too, which you can get for probably less than $50.

Interesting professorroush! Thanks for posting!

I have an Epson V200 scanner. It is a flatbed scanner that can also slide film and slides. I paid around $80 for it. I bought this over a year ago. I am not sure of the availabilty of this certain model, as it has been discontinued, - other than eBay or Amazon. I can scan up to 4 slides at once. You load the slide tray and press scan. It puts each slide into a seperate file. You can specify where you want them saved. It is quite simple to use and I have been extremely happy with the results. It will scan at up to 4800 dpi. I generally scan my slides at a resolution of 600 dpi - and can get fantasic 4x6 prints. If you were looking to make poster size prints, you would want to up your dpi. The higher the dpi - the larger the file and the longer it takes to scan. If you do not have a lot of "horsepower" in your computer, scanning at really high dpi will take a long time. Scanning dpi and printing dpi are two entirely different things. You can google and research this further if you want. This is a slide from the early 1950's, scanned at 600 dpi. You can correct dust, backlighting, etc. I think HP has a flatbed scanner that can scan 16 slides at a time..this would be sweet if you are looking at a large number of slides. I love my Epson scanner - but have also been happy with HP scanners. I have attached a link to HP. It is very informative regarding slide scanning. Here is a link that might be useful: Slide scanning - from HP

I purchased my DSLR a little over a year ago and have taken hundreds of photos in my garden. I have deleted many of them and have kept more than I should. There are many times that I go out to do one little thing and I see something, have to hurry into the house to get my camera and scurry back to see if whatever is still there. This morning, I had just finished dividing some of my iris and was toting my stuff back to the garage and happened to see a spider in its web devouring an insect. Of course I didn't have my camera, hurry-hurry and back outside. Aha, caught a bit of the action. Hooray. At The Garden Party forum on GardenWeb, I have posted many of my 'captures' to share. Some have been listed as outside the house; while others were garden stuff. I enjoy sharing my gardens that way. Creatures, flowers and veggies are all the same to me. Keep going and share more photos. Jim