A new love

I splurged and bought a new camera! It's been the highlight of the year so far.  I got the Canon T3i DSLR, and I am totally in love already.

Seriously in love.

I spent a couple of months hemming and hawing about it, wondering if I should spend that much on a camera, if I'd really use it enough to make it worth it, if I should wait until Christmas sales, and so on... In the end I decided I should definitely buy it, as I have always dreamed of getting into photography.  If I never bought the camera I needed to make that happen, how would I ever in fact make that happen?  Right.

My husband spent hours researching online, as he is so good at, and found a great deal through Amazon.  I discovered that I could use my reward points from work to offset the hefty pricetag, so it seemed like a no brainer. 

Once the purchase was made, I couldn't have been more giddy about it.  I watched the FedEx tracker all week to see when it would arrive. My sister was coming home that weekend for a visit, so I had hoped it'd arrive in time for us to play around with the settings on our matching cameras all weekend long.   It did, and we did. 

I had the battery charging the minute I opened it, and spent the rest of the evening opening up all the accessories, admiring all the lenses and filters and buttons to choose from, touching them oh so delicately.  It was like Christmas!

Since then, I have been studying this amazing book to learn everything that I need to know about using my camera and taking quality pictures.  Aperture, ISO, White Balance...all new concepts for this girl.  And I still don't really know what they all mean.  Mandy, when are we taking that class?  ;)

Here is a random photo taken while trying out white balance settings, first with the daylight setting and then with indoor lightbulb setting.  The difference is obvious.  Many cameras with auto settings try to capture what setting would be most appropriate, but supposedly they don't always get it right.  That's the beauty of this pup - I can manually select what settings are right for the scene.  But I also feel like my camera is probably smart enough to get it right most of the time on Auto.

I really adore the ability to select the focal point.  Want to focus on something in the background?  Piece of cake.  Hi, boy on my cousin's kid's baseball team on third base!

The fast shutter speeds are also amazing to have.  This is the awesome sequence you get of something in action. 

I'm not a true Yankee fan, but I am for these Yanks!  A week earlier, I showed him photos of himself with his tongue sticking out in every shot on the field...notice how in the photos above on this day he's got his lips pressed together?  Too cute.


And little babies are enthralled by the repetitive clicks of the shutter as you take pictures.  At least this darling little girl at the baseball game was.

Of course, whenever children are involved, you can never be certain where their next move will take them, so you have to be quick.  And because they are quick, you don't want them to show up as blurred images on your photos as they are running towards (or away from) you. 

This almost worked, except his flailing hands are blurry.  I haven't completely mastered the manual settings for objects in motion.  Maybe my shutter speed was too low.  Who the heck knows, I'm just learning.  I took 300+ photos in one single evening with him.  Granted I have my camera on continuous setting so that I can take like 3 or 4 of each shot.  About 100 were worthy of keeping.   Overboard maybe, but it was fun.  And this kid is so ridiculously cute, I may just steal him from his mother someday when she's not looking.


I bought two lenses with my camera and love them both.  I've been using the 55-250mm lens more than the 18-55mm lens, as I really haven't been taking shots super close.  There have been a few times, like taking pictures of that baby girl sitting right next to her, where I apparently was too close to her with my long lens and it wouldn't take the shot.  But, I'm slowly figuring out what kind of space I need. 

I also appreciated the long lens to capture this mother, who decided to build a hive right in the doorframe of our front door.  I wasn't willing to get very close.  Look at those beady eyes staring me down.

This mother wasp hung out here all. the. time.  Seriously, we were waiting for her to leave so that we could knock it down, and she was always there, hanging out.  We'd sneak out the door as fast as possible to get to our patio, and she'd just stare at us guarding her home.  Eventually, I noticed when she left one evening, opened the door, whacked it out to the lawn with a bbq spatula, and slammed the door shut and peered out the peephole.  I should have probably warned Jon, who was out on the patio grilling (eeek, bad wife?), but luckily he was unharmed.  Two wasps flew out the second it hit the ground, and that mother wasp?  She was back in the spot of her former home on the door frame less than 20 minutes later.  I felt somewhat bad about that, but seriously, we can't have a wasp's nest in our doorway!  I sprayed the spot with windex and no sighting since. 

The camera also works well on fathers.  Here are ours, drooling over their favorite pies on Father's Day.  I have mastered the key lime pie, but must now try the banana cream so that both of them get homemade pies. 

In summary, I love my new camera.  If that wasn't already obvious.  I can't wait to learn more about photography and get better at this thing.  I may become the annoying camera lady, but I have to make good use of my camera!