Whay is the ideal camera or cameras for landscapes and portraits?

Portraits and landscapes are very different, so for maximum versatility, I'd recommend you get a dSLR. The brand is not that important - Canon 500D, Nikon D60, Sony A350.

After you decide on the brand, you'll have to get (at least) 2 lenses:

- an ultrawide (I have Sigma 10-20mm, but others will do). For landscapes you'll want to get a very wide perspective.

- a fast (F2.8 or less) short telephoto (70-200) lens for portraits. Choose a lens with wide apertures to be able to blur the background - always good for portraits - and shoot it low light. Telephoto lenses work best for portraits as they create a more flattering look (wide lenses distort the features).

As for software, Photoshop obviously and if you're planning on shooting RAW (which I recommend) Adobe Lightroom is the best one overall, you can read a comparison between Lightroom, Capture One4 and DXO 5 here: http://www.twin-pixels.com/raw-heavyweights/

Do you know, only the other day, I sent my camera out with instructions to shoot some gorgeous dawn landscapes. After all, who wants to get up at 3.30am? Lazy thing came back with nothing, zilch, nada. So it looks like once again I'm going to be the one who gets up early, goes to the location, assesses the possible compositions and chooses the correct framing for the best one, sets the camera up, decides on the lens focal length, f-stop, depth of field, shutter speed, allows for the rapidly-changing light conditions round about sunrise and presses the shutter release. Oh, and decides whether it's worth bracketing the exposure and by how much. There's a message hidden here somewhere. See if you can work out what it is.

Nikon D60

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8721...

If you want to shoot professional photos, you should get an SLR camera, I vote for Canon or Nikon because these are the world's best.

I won Canon 1000D, if you want to see a sample of it, follow the link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/anasarab/sets/7215761...

as to SLR cameras, you can have many types of lenses suitable for your purpose, such as ( zoom lenses, macro lenses or telephoto lenses )

if you have any other questions about digital SLR cameras do not hesitate ..

Anas

Linhof Master Technika