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Please try a Lumix in low light before suggesting those. I got a Lumix to give as a gift - very slow camera and blurry for dim or fast-moving shots.

Canon is good, but I'm biased since I have a Rebel T3 DSLR. Set it to full auto, point, shoot, and just about anybody can use it with its standard lens. The only down side is that you'll be taking so many pictures that you'll have to buy more SD cards. If you turn the flash off, this one shoots almost as fast as you can push the button - excellent for sports. If you get into it, you'll want to try rentglass and KEH for trying different lenses.

One advantage of SLR - you can't accidentally leave the lens cap on since you're looking through the same lens as the sensor.

You'd be surprised how many (most of the users on this board are amateurs). I know I'm one of many. Professionals are dumping their medium-format gear for digital SLRs, so the prices have hit rock-bottom and are very affordable to amateurs like me.

For example, back-in-the-day, the Mamiya RB67 was the workhorse of a studio camera and you can now pick one up for US$172.00. Cheap, I tell ya!

If you intend on making this a life-long hobby, I would seriously consider this from the perspective of building your equipment base. You don't want to start with a Pentax and find that in 2 years you want something better and have to scrap everything and start from scratch. In my mind, there are only two choices: Nikon or Canon. I'd go with Nikon.

Pickup a used Nikon FE or FE2 off of eBay (I've also had several good experiences with KEH), get yourself a 50mm 1.4/f or 1.8/f lense and go to it. I spent a year learning with an FE2 and a 50mm before I even considered another lense. I fell in love with manual focus and match-needle metering.

The nice thing about a Nikon system is that you can use all of their AI lenses developed since the 70's with just about any of their bodies, including some of their digital SLRs. So when you decide you're ready for a more automatic camera, including one of with autofocus, you can still use your manual kit with it. You can't do that with a Canon. Don't get me wrong, Canon's USM lenses are the bomb, and their digital gear is simply amazing, but you can't use their older (thus, cheaper) manual kit with their newer automatic cameras. This puts you in the position of either starting with an automatic system and possibly not learning as much, or starting with manual gear, and then having to buy everything again when you go automatic.

Finally, stop over to Photo.net and start reading. Phillip's a bit of a zealot, but he gives excellent advice with a solid foundation of knowledge.

The first thing you should do is sit down and ask yourself "what kind of photography are you going to do"? Family outings, travel, scenery, sports, ??? Then pick the best (beginners) camera / lens for the job. For example, sports or photojournalism photographers lean towards a 35mm / digital SLR with a telephoto or zoom lens. Same with bird / animal nature photography. OTOH, scenery photographers tend to either lean towards 35mm with low grain film or medium format cameras. When I take pictures on a family outing, I want to travel light as possible (ie, don't want any clunky 35mm when an ultralight digital point and shoot (P&S) will do). So the first question is "what do you want to shoot"?

IMHO, based on the type of shots you want, choose the lens(es) [brand name and focal length], and that will dictate what body you will get. Try to get a quality lens. Once you buy the camera, it doesn't make sense to have to immediately resell the camera body AND lens when you want to expand and find out your options are limited, so think of it as buying into a family.

IMHO, you may want manual control when learning, but you will eventually want some automation down the road. This is especially when newer camera automated metering systems (such as Nikon's N65 or N75) do so well nowadays. Whatever you do, go to a camera store and check out the "user interface" to see how easy it is to do something in manual mode...

Here's a site that I believe has good advice on cameras in general and all the newest cameras. Don't forget to check out his gallery as well!

Film is another important choice. IN GENERAL, higher film "speeds" allow more opportunities to shoot, but lower film speeds tend (I say TEND) to have finer grain (read sharper) pictures. High speed film has gotten much better nowadays, grain wise. Slide film has more vivid colors, but is more contrasty, so it's harder to shoot in areas with bright/shadowy areas. Print (negative) film has more "latitude" or less contrasty, but generally doesn't have the visual impact of slides. Portrait photograpy tends to use print film, nature or scenery tends to use slides. Digital tends to be vivid like slide film, depending upon the camera / sensor, but it's "latitude" is generally less than film (here come the flames!).

I know I'm gonna get flamed for this, but I totally disagree that film is better to learn photography on than digital. You would be right in saying a film SLR is better than a digital point and shoot, but a digital SLR (Canon 300D) would allow you to see what shutter speed and lens aperture does for the shot just as well as any film. Plus, you don't have to wait day(s) to see what the results of your settings are. I only caution you to check out the user interface of the digital SLR to see how easy it is to shoot totally manual.

What did I do? I started with a Nikon FM with 24mm and 20mm lens for scenery photography a long time ago. I use a Nikon CP700 for family outings. I recently bought a used Mamiya 1000s system for $400 at KEH for scenery photography (totally MANUAL). I use Fuji's Velvia 50 slide and I also bought a Epson 3170 scanner to digitize the photos. It's been trial and error, but I love the eye popping color and resolution when I get it right! I can also get my pics drum scanned and professionally printed if I choose, so I like my setup...

The FD line is the manual-focus one, as you wanted. Those bodies/lenses are built to last, have great quality, and aren't expensive.

First, get a good body - A-1 is my personal favorite, although you may get an AE-1 or a T-70 instead. Ignore the T-90 and F1 for the time being (T-90 has too many features; F1 is intended for serious professionals).

Then, get two lenses:

1) a fixed 50mm f1.4 lens (THE all-around lens, light and fast, highly corrected, AND cheap)

2) a zoom lens. The 75-200 lens is a good entry choice (good optics, slow but pretty light).

Finally, a good flash. Speedlite 199-A is my choice.

You'll need a case to carry all of this (buy it AFTER getting the above-mentioned hardware), and some filters (a polarizer, a warming filter and a skylight filter are the most basic ones).

AND, you'll need to make choices about film - there's a LOT of different film types, each one with its own strength and weakness. For all-around negative film, I love Fuji Superia REALA 100. For slides, Fuji Provia (black and white I don't know enough yet).

You may buy all this stuff at KEH - they're a bit more expensive than getting the stuff from e-bay, but you can rest assured that they'll deliver items in the quality they stated and you won't have surprises.

On the other hand, IMO your budget is way low.

Countless excellent photographs were made before autofocus, autoexposure, digital, image stabilization, and other modern innovations. They are conveniences, not necessities, and may in fact be obstacles to learning the craft.

I started with a K-1000, but when it was $130 from K-mart in 1984. They aren't made anymore and are more expensive than warranted due to (overblown) reputation.

Yes, they're tough (mine still worked fine 4 years ago with no CLA (clean, lubricate and adjust) when I traded up to a Super Program), but they're lacking:

1) Crappy meter. Slow to react and wierdly non-linear at low light levels, so not good for existing light photography with an f/1.4 50mm lens & 400ASA film.

2) No depth of field (a.k.a. depth of focus) preview. This is a hard feature to learn how to use, but control of DOF is a big part of learning photography and one area where 35mm kicks the crap out of point-and-shoot digicams (which have small sensors, short focal lengths and deep DOF so hard to knock the background out of focus for portraits).

3) Slow flash sync (X) speed. 1/60th, right? Once you learn manual existing-light photography, you might want to try manual (guide number/focus distance) flash photography. For fill-flash (lighting up a face shaded by a hat brim or eyes shaded by brow), faster sync gives you flexibility.

[I actually don't recommend trying to learn to use bounce & other tricks to make flash look more natural on anything but digital unless you have a darkroom. Too much lag between exposure & result to figure out what you're doing]

4) rubberized-cloth fully mechanical shutter. This means the battery only powers the meter & the camera will work with no battery at all. However, it isn't as accurate as quartz-controlled metal blade shutters like in the SuperProgram.

That said, the Pentax line is nice because the lenses work on the new bodies (including their digital *ist), though sometimes metering doesn't work. Nikon is the only other mfg. that kept the mount the same when they went autofocus-- Canon & Minolta changed. Minolta still makes their manual focus cameras, though. Canon manuals are orphaned with parts getting harder to find.

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Make sure you get a "fast" lens. 85mm or 100mm f/2 or 50mm f/1.4. It's damned hard to focus an f/2 50mm lens (which came on my K1000 originally) because the DOF wide-open is too deep to give you a "snappy" focus.

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Oh and KEH for mail-order used.

as an owner of an F5, I find most Nikon's controls as logically laid out. A N75 would be a good choice for a beginner, or if you don't mind a manual camera, you can have an inexpensive pro-level camera and lenses for a great deal, look for the Nikon FE, or the FM used, like on KEH.com, a great source for high quality used cameras. and with a Nikon, when you upgrade from a manual-focus camera to an autofocus camera you have a good chance of being able to used the great lenses you already have!