MEET MY CAMERA: PENTAX K100D

This will (hopefully) be a scheduled post for while I'm away. I'm off on a surfing jaunt to Cornwall. I say surfing, I mean barely standing up on a board in shallow water. Hopefully I'll pick up where I left off last year and be back doing it properly within no time - and this time with no head injuries to boot.

Meet my first 'proper' camera, a Pentax K100D Super Digital SLR. My brother has the K100D original however it barely gets used - sometimes I use it as a spare if I need to switch quickly between telephoto and wide-angle lenses.

I've had this camera for about five years, and it's been through/survived a lot: it once was entirely soaked with Monster energy drink and once had two live ants inside it on holiday. It has survived snowboarding, sand, every form of weather known to man, a hell of a lot of dust, being bashed, and I even used it whilst facing backwards on a horse, riding with no hands. And apart from a slightly sticky manual flash button, it's in tip top condition.

It was great for an amateur starting out - easy to work out, decent range of features and relatively good basic image quality for five years ago; and cheap in camera terms, because it eats AA batteries like I eat cake. Though this probably doesn't matter because nowadays it seems every other teenager is running around with a professional grade Canon...

I'm planning to upgrade to a refurbed mid-range Nikon at some point so I can make use of my mother's pretty lenses, but I'll definitely always keep this baby on hand for those days when I really don't feel like bothering with manual shooting, and I want something I can count on.