There Are Pandas, and Then There Are Pandas.
And this isn't either of them! The Pandas we're talking about here, are watches, not bears. And what got me thinking about them (again) was a link posted this morning by @cm.rook who pointed a few of us to the very attractive (and not terribly priced) Yema "Rallygraph" Panda which, in it's most traditional arrangement, looks like the one on the left, but can also be had in the version on the right: The model on the left is a true Panda, while the model on the right is called a reverse Panda. The reason for that distinction is clear--Panda bears, only come in the first arrangement. Now at this point, everyone should be thinking about the most well-know Panda, The Rolex Panda, which is actually a Daytona, and among Rolex Daytonas, the most famous of which is the Paul Newman Daytona, which was famous first, because it was Paul's, and second because it sold at auction for $17.8 million (US Dollars). The story of that auction is well-known so I'll only...
Nov 8, 2019
I never managed to buy a SLR until I found a Minolta xd-11 kit at a sheriff's auction about 1996 or 97. I had taken photography class in high school more than 10 years earlier, but never picked up a SLR after that. The Minolta was 20 years old then, but it was a quality camera from it's time with basic auto-exposure. I relearned the techniques of using a SLR. But the first camera I really liked a lot was my Nikon D80 that I bought myself when I turned 40 in 2007. I moved in to digital photography initially about 2002 with a Nikon Coolpix 995 as a higher-end consumer camera, but it was slow to use. I kept using it until I felt a DSLR was in my reach.