As for photography vs. CCDs, my preference is a wide field color photo over a CCD image pretty much any day of the week (I know, I'm just weird). Fuji and Kodak are doing wonders with new emulsions these days, try Kodak Ultra Gold 400. Besides, if you already have an SLR camera the startup costs are much lower too, depending on what you can cobble together for a guiding arrangement. Cheap department store refractors can make for a passable guide scope if you already have one gathering dust in a corner.
It sounds like you're just interested in short duration astrophotos (ie - less than 15 minutes), so the requirements are a bit less stringent than for marathon sessions at the guiding eyepiece. For these length exposures you don't really need declination corrections if your polar alignment is good. Besides, a simple tangent arm for dec corrections isn't that big of a deal to hook up.
If you want info about my homebuilt equatorial feel free to ask...
Good luck
Steve Dillinger fmicos!dillinger@uunet.uu.net