1st CAMERA

Canon 1DS Mark II.
It's a great camera to start with.

i have a cannon s2 is powershot and its mint i highly reccomend it

If you're on a tight cashflow, Fuji is my pref. Running my site for ten years, you've seen what I've been able to do with the cams I use.

I used to use a Kodak DC-290 (2mp) back when it was sold for $1200 but you can find 'em now for $100-200 on e-bay. I don't like the easyshare stuff... too much delay.

Fuji on the other hand, night shots, action shots, action shots at night... it'll do 'em all. I used a Fuji S-5100 a friend of mine had bought (took 200-300 pics then handed it to me - I gave it back with over 15,000 pics having been taken in less than two months) last season. Over the summer we ended up buying a pair of S-5100's and an S-5200.

Figure before memory, they can be had for $300-350. Memory wise, there's a pair of 256mb, a 512mb, and a 1gb as well as the 16mb cards that come with 'em. In the S-5100, 1gb is enough for nearly 1200 shots; 900 in the S-5200. If you don't have the thousand dollars or more to get started in DSLR, the Fujis are my recommendation. Each day we take 1,000-1,500 photos ... and on the few sunny days, we shoot far more than that. So when you ask about their reliability, they've all passed 10,000 photos a few times this season already.

Choice is yours but for less than $400, it's a great deal. More memory is more price but the base is a great deal - can always expand on memory.