Camera News

I will not even check when my last post went up. I might get overwhelmed and decide never to post again.

Many, many things have been happening. Lots of changes in the last three or four months.
The changes began with a new camera that I got in November. I had my previous one for a couple of years already, and felt I was ready to move on to something more professional. Since my husband had gotten a bonus at work, we decided to go with a DSLR. I ordered a Canon XSi and waited for it with bated breath.

When it finally came, I was thrilled. Until I wasn't
First of all, the zoom was pitiful. I had 10x zoom on my old camera, and this one had only three. This conflicted with my style of photography, which is to be removed from my subjects and let them do their stuff while I photograph. With a 3x zoom, I am only able to take pictures when I am right in front of the subject. To add to the problem, the camera didn't focus properly when I had the LCD preview on. It only worked the right way with the viewfinder. Since my kids aren't used to seeing my face behind a large black box, I often got looks like these when I was photographing:

The older kids, who understood why there was a big black box in front of my face, didn't look perplexed as Adi did in the photo above. But they did have a look of, "Hey! A photo! Let's be artificially happy!"

 

 And then there was the issue of white balance. That's what makes your photo be true to color. As opposed to "aged-newspaper."

In the DSLR camera it was very hard to set the white balance. Actually, it was impossible, but I imagine that it would change to "very hard" once I kind of figured it out. Reading up on reviews, I saw I wasn't the only user that had this problem.
Not to say the aged-newspaper look isn't nice. But I would like to be able to choose for which pictures I want the effect.

The flash was okay. Not different from any other flash on any other camera. I knew I wanted to get some external flash eventually, but for the price I paid for the DSLR, I was hoping the flash would be at least slightly nicer than my old point-and-shoot.

 Now here is something I didn't understand at all. When switching to macro (that's the closeup mode) I lost all the ability for manual functions! Which means that if it's slightly dark, the flash popped up. I had no option to brighten the photo by raising ISO, opening the aperture, raising exposure compensation, or increasing the time the shutter stays open. Also, it didn't give me the option to use the LCD screen to preview. I had to use the viewfinder. Imagine trying to get a closeup shot of a flower close to the ground or an insect... or any small detail that's at an odd angle. Imagine twisting your head to keep your eye by the viewfinder in those situations.

This photo of my coffee was taken in macro, and the flash had gone off. I had no option to turn it off. It still came out nice, but... I don't think that's something I can live with long term.

One other thing about the very limited zoom that  annoyed me- no photos of kids at play. I'd have to catch them, tell them to stop, and snap a photo. I love to take running photos, but with a small zoom, I have to wait till they are practically on top of my head before I can take a photo. The lenses are interchangeable, but higher zoom lenses cost in the thousands (and their size and weight are in the same league as their price.)

I did get a few nice photos... but nothing to get a DSLR for.

I returned it and got a Canon SX30 IS. I'm very happy with it.

So I guess this post wasn't about all the many changes that took place recently... it was just about one of them. So I changed the title from "Brain Dump" to what it is now. But stay tuned for the actual brain dump post!