When I bought my first camera, I knew the type of pictures that I wanted to take. My budget was tight, so I bought a Fuji point & shoot. It took great pictures that were sharp and vivid, but the pictures didn't come out how I wanted. A year later, that camera was dropped and gave me the perfect excuse to buy a better one. I went up a notch and bought a Panasonic DMC FZ8, which gave me manual controls, could shoot in RAW, and had a wicked 12x zoom. The style was getting closer to what I wanted, but it still didn't look like what I imagined in my head. Fast-forward a year later, specifically last week, when I bought my first DSLR: a Nikon D40.