How to buy a digital camera when your wife is against it, you don’t really “need” it and you don’t know what you’re doing anyway.

About 25 years ago, Kathy bought me my first 35mm SLR camera. I remember the moment even now. At a small birthday party, she placed several wrapped boxes on the table. I opened the smallest one first. It was 35mm film. I looked at her quizzically and like a dope I said, “But I don’t have a camera that uses…!” And the next box was a Mamiya manual SLR with a 50mm lens. I was completely blown away. She went out on her own, talked to the guy in the camera shop and decided on a model and bought it, all without saying a word to me.

I eventually replaced it with a Nikon FM2, a completely manual camera. No autofocus, no auto-anything. You set the aperture, you focus it and hope for the best. I bought that for myself as a graduation present in 1992, along with a 28-80mm lens. It worked perfectly up until this past summer, when I put $200 into it to put it back in good shape.

Then the digital bug started nibbling around the edges. I listed all the things I didn’t like about them: the parallax error with the traditional viewfinder (you don’t quite see everything you’re shooting because the little viewfinder is not in line with the lens, but is over on the side); using the LCD window to frame the shot (thinking I’d be shaking all over the place with my three foot arms out trying to line up everything); wondering how I’m going to print now; and just general trepidation about moving away from my beloved manual, traditional, comfortable, familiar old dog.

But the thing is, we are going on a cruise in January and I was leery of bringing the big clunky camera with me.

I did all my research, consulting my son in law Peter (I really like being able to say “son in law”), and the dpreview website. Peter has a photography business, so if you don’t mind a bit of shameless promotion, go here to check out his work.

It looked like the Nikon Coolpix 7900 had everything I was looking for. I read all the reviews, good and bad, and decided that there is such a thing as too much information. The next thing was to convince Kathy to let me buy it. Turns out she was dead set against it. Even though it was not coming out of our checking account, but rather money I’ve been saving toward the cruise. She was highly ticked off at me, partly because she thought the somehow we would not have enough money to do the things she wanted to do on the cruise. I assured her that this was not the case, but there was no joy in Mudville, at least for the following week.

She thought we should buy a digital video camera so we could capture Max at his finest. Finally she broached the subject with her good friend Cookie, who suggested that we buy a camera that could do both. Just talking things over with her friend helped her sort things out. I told her that yes, this camera will also do movies. (OK—with a 1gig memory card, it will hold 15 minutes of video).

So finally, it was with her blessing that I went back on line and bought the camera and a bunch of “must have” accessories. I am so excited. This is going to be cool.

I wouldn’t have bought it until she was comfortable with the idea. The whole process was like a “Lifetime” movie: it ran for a week, had lots of ups and downs and ended happily.