New camera!

Woohoo, check out my new Canon Rebel XTi/400D! We bought it at Henry's from a fellow named John Sloan.



I liked John because he seemed knowledgeable about Canons and was opinionated but not pushy. He also didn't rush through a sale, and was very patient with questions. Scott Murray came with Jeff and me; thanks to Scott for his patience waiting through the whole process!

Turns out Henry's also had the Sigma 30mm f1.4 lens after all! We're also trying out a Canon 17-85 and a 70-300. Here's one of the first photos that Jeff took with the 70-300, out in our backyard:



Going through the user manual and the Digital Rebel XTi/400D Field Guide, I can tell I have a TON to learn. Holy toledo. This camera can do so much more than my point-and-shoot.

Like the ability to control aperture and focus points (with a Sigma 30 mm f1.4 lens):



and then changing the main focus point:



In this photo, I've set the focus point on the little pink thingy that Jeff bought me from The Magic Pony a while back, and turned the other focus points off:



(unmodified except for cropping)

I still have to get used to the Sigma's narrower field, compared to my point and shoot, but so far I love it. Other differences (apart from the obvious features) I've noticed so far with the XTi/Sigma vs my Canon PowerShot:

- Much faster (e.g. turning on, focusing, taking a photo)

- Colours much richer. With my PowerShot, I have to fiddle with the image (colours, sharpness, etc.) for pretty much every shot.

- The light!!!! Sorry for all the exclamation marks, but I love LOVE having so much more light to play with. So much that I can tell that I have so much to learn about just this one topic alone. With my PowerShot, taking photos iin low-light situations was always a challenge. I usually ended up pumping up the ISO to 400, with the result of much graininess. With the XTi, I can turn the ISO up to 1600 (!) but also get a ton more light through the lens.

Take a look at the following photo, for example, which I took with my point-and-shoot:



(unmodified except for cropping)

[Update: I realize that I should have taken the latter photo at the highest resolution and brightness to be fair to my little point-and-shoot, plus duplicated lighting situations exactly. Once I'm more experienced with my XTi, I'll another series of comparison shots.]

A close-up comparison:





Must go experiment some more. Thanks again to everyone who has offered camera advice on Facebook, Livejournal, Photo.net, DCresource.com, and especially Ray and Iain for letting me try out their cameras.



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