I'm a zoology grad student in far-off (for yanks and poms, anyway!) New Zealand - meaning I am lucky enough to get to go to all sorts of awesome places and see some amazing animals - or get rained and snowed on, more likely.
To the gist of it!
I have had some success taking photos with my Panasonic Lumix FZ-1. Love the 12x optical zoom, hate the two megapixels and complete lack of any kind of manual control - autofocus on those things is useless when you have a saddleback hopping around your head or a parakeet whizzing past!
Now I am looking to upgrade to a D-SLR, with the plan being to take lots of (hopefully) beautiful pictures of animals and scenery...and ideally build up to some more "artsy" photography and people shots.
Was quite keen on a Nikon D70, but have since talked to some people (including the director of a Natural History Film Making course!) who have suggested the Canon 300D...the plus of the 300D being a wider range of cheaper lenses with image stabilisation (A definite must-have, the rainforests here are too dense to lug around a tripod sometimes...being 6'3 can be enough of a challenge!). Also the 300D is a bit cheaper, which would let me get a few more lenses...
I was wondering what the consensus would be on which camera to get? Most of the forums here seem to be about sports, people or still life...
Obviously as a student I am VERY budget constrained, would be looking at maybe around NZ$2000 (maybe about...US$1400?).
Also which lenses would be good? I am thinking I would need a long-range lens (like a 300mm), a good mid-range one (like the 28-70mm that comes with the D70 kit)...and ideally some kind of macro would be awesome, a lot of my work is with little 1 inch tree frogs!
Sorry for the novel-like length of this post...