Here’s an online web-based camera simulator…
Most critical – the relationship between aperture and shutter — here.
Camera shake simulator
Film speed sim (for Digital, there’s an equivalent setting)

In a nutshell; to get a perfect (or good anyways) exposure, you need three critical ingredients, aperture, shutter and ISO/ASA (or film speed). For film users, ISO (or ASA) is set by the film you buy. In digital, that can be changed so you have three settings to play with. Remember that if you reduce aperture, you will need to increase something else to compensate. Think of it as a balance scale. For a set ISO, shutter speed and aperture value, you have a nice exposure. Reduce shutter speed and you might need to increase aperture to get the same exposure. Exposure = amount of light needed.

ISO/ASA (or film speed) tells you how much light you need. Shutter and aperture controls the amount of light you get. Like a faucet, larger aperture (smaller value!) means you turn on the tap larger, shutter speed tells you how long you keep the tap open. Longer means more water (or in this case, more light).

Relationships:
Shutter speed: numeric in fractions of a second or seconds, higher = longer. i.e.:
1/500s or 1/125s or 1/30s to 1.0s or 5.0 seconds.
Aperture: numbers called f-stops, lower number = bigger aperture. i.e.:
f/2.8 = large aperture, f/4 = smaller aperture, f/8 = small aperture
ISO/ASA : film speed or digital sensor sensitivity. Larger number = more sensitve, less light needed. i.e.:
ISO 100, ISO 400, ISO 800..

Michael Reichmann of Luminous Landscape has posted his field test of Canon’s newest Digital SLR, the EOS-350D (or Digital Rebel XT). You can find this field test here.

Canon USA is shipping the EOS-350D (or the Digital Rebel XT) a week earlier than expected! You can find out here. Also, Canon Japan has posted some new full size Digital Rebel XT sample images, including macro and night shots, here.
B&H also has them in stock, both the black and the silver models at US$999 for the kit and $899 for body-only.

They used to be giants, but Digital killed them…
Reports on DPReview show that Kyocera is stopping production of all film and digital cameras, this also means that brands like Contax (Kyocera owns Contax), started by Zeiss Ikon may be long gone. See here.
R.I.P.

Canon USA Digital Rebel XT (EOS-350D) White Paper here.
Preview at DPReview here
CPS Europe Issue #11 covers the EOS-350D here.
Canon USA Official EOS-350D info here.
Steve’s Digicams preview page here.

Everytime a trip is over and I’m back home unpacking or rather leaving a mess of stuff all over my room, copying and backing up the thousands of images captured and other stuff, I tend to look at what I’ve brought and how much of it I used (or didn’t use).

Copper water vat – Forbidden City

This time round, I brought my EOS-20D (no backup), EF16-35mm lens and EF70-200mm lens. I also brought my 550EX flash unit along. For storage, I have my Nixvue with 60Gb disk. I didn’t shoot that much so disk space wasn’t an issue. In terms of photo equipment, generally, I walked around all day with just a single camera and single lens. My EF16-35mm saw primary service, 99% of the time. The EF16-35 with the 1.6 crop factor roughly gives me a 25-56mm lens which is useful for most cases but was a bit short at times.

Tianamen Square Beijing

Granted, in many places it was too cold and difficult to change lenses and you could say that I got lazy and should have changed lenses when I should. Actually I felt that perhaps my EF28-135IS lens would have performed better in this case and would have served as a better walk-around lens. Then again, this trip wasn’t like most trips so it’s hard to say what works and what didn’t. The only thing I felt didn’t work was the tripod. Other than group shots which was not frequent, the tripod was probably the least used piece of equipment on the trip. Mostly, I’d just change the ISO on camera and worked. With the superb low-noise performance, I could shoot at ISO1600 without visible noise, even at 12×18 print sizes. Maybe it was cold, but try to find a camera that does ISO 1600 this clean and I’ll buy you a beer, a Harbin beer that is!

Great Wall at Badaling