+ iRebel

After months of working hard and saving up all my shiny pennies, I bought my first digital SLR camera, and she is a beauty. The all black, Canon Rebel XTi (aka 400D abroad) with the Canon EF-S 18-55mm f 3.5 - 5.6 lens (sample pics below).

For those who are not photo-geeks like me, this is a great starter SLR camera kit; perfect for those who want to break into some digital photography. After some problems with buying an XTi Bundle Package from ebay, I settled on Amazon and promptly spent a lot of money.

There should be a warning label next to these cameras that say something to the effect of, "WARNING: YOU MAYBE ABLE TO AFFORD THIS CAMERA NOW, BUT SOON YOU SPEND MANY TIMES OVER ON EXPENSIVE LENSES, GADGETS, and OTHER ACCESSORIES."

So in the 4 days since I got this camera I bought the following:

• UV Filter
• The battery grip with two extra rechargeable batteries
• a 4 GB compact flash card (that has yet to come, damn you Amazon vendor BlueProton Consulting -- I got the expedited shipping too!),
  
• Carrying case/backpack to hold the camera and all these extra accessories

Nice, eh? And none of these actually improve the quality of the photos (yet), that's where the real money gets spent; in the lenses.

So here are some of the first images that the XTi has captured...

From tamonline: "Robin's Focus"

From tamonline: "Zoe"

From tamonline

From tamonline, "Beep BEEP Beep Beep Beep"

My goal is to practice and shoot everything. So there will be more to come, and I maybe going on a little foliage trip to the North East (Vermont?) -- so hopefully there'll soon be some good posting material (not to mention the year in Shanghai!).

~Bt