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At the beginning, I had no camera on my own, I just took my mother's APS compact camera and used that for shooting. It was better than nothing (I did quite a large number of photos during my trip to Indonesia with it) but the very limited zoom and the rather poor quality of the builtin lens was a big problem.

In 2000, on the wise counsel of a close friend of mine who just bought a Minolta Dynax 800 (film, in these times, digital was still very expensive and not yet good enough to compete), I bought myself a Minolta 600si Classic. Very nice camera, easier to work with than the bigger and more expensive 800, I did a lot of pictures with it. Very happy I was.

Most of the "Voyages" and "Ferté-Allais" were taken with it, either with the very nice 28-105mm/f3.5-f4.5 Minolta lens I bought instead of the standard 28-80 or with a Vivitar 70-210mm/f4.5-f5.6 a friend lent me for a few months.

I said was because during the summer of 2006, it was stolen along with a Canon camera my SO had and the Canon Ixus 400 we bought in 2003 before our daughter's birth. The bastards stole the three cameras and the two memory card (256 MB CF) with pictures and the film in the 600si :-(