Photog

(Can you spot me in the picture above??)

Over the course of my last dozen posts, I've gotten a few comments inquiring as to what kind of camera I use, so I thought I would answer those questions with one post.

**Disclaimer** I am by no means a photography expert, nor do I pretend to be! Far from it, I'm usually downright embarrassed at my crappy photography "skills"! Nope...I'm just a mom who likes to take a ridiculous amount of pictures of her kid, and did a LOT of research before buying a camera.

When our little girl was born, I of course took hundreds of photographs with our point and shoot (a Canon), but was not satisfied with the quality of the pictures. Many times the photograph would be blurry, or our daughter's face would look white as a ghost from the glare of the flash. My biggest pet peeve was that the camera had such a long delay that I was missing some of those fleeting firsts, like the first smile, first unassisted sit, first crawl, etc.

So for Christmas 2008, my parents generously bought us a new camera. I knew from my research that I wanted a DSLR (which stands for Digital Single-Lens Reflex - if you're not familiar with that term, you can get a much better explanation than I could give here). After a lot of studying, I settled on this baby:


This is the Canon Rebel XS. It is Canon's base model DSLR, and you can get a pretty good price on these cameras at a number of places (I believe Target even carries them). From everything that I read, I knew that for the price, the quality of this camera could not be beat.

I cannot rave enough about the Rebel! It is very user friendly - while it has LOTS of bells and whistles (for which I don't have the first clue how to use and I've had the camera for over a year!), you don't need to understand them to use this camera, it is very user friendly. Even without knowing all of the tricks of this camera when we first got it, I was so happy with the improvement in the quality of our pictures, just shooting in the automatic mode. Since then, I've learned a little bit more about the different settings - it truly is a camera that you can GROW into.

One piece of advice that I can provide which I have heard numerous times is that it is the lens, not the camera body, which is the critical piece of the puzzle. Lenses can be costly, with some lens (that I have to think are only purchased by professionals) costing upwards of $5000 (!!). Thankfully for us non-professionals, there is a really great lens that is reasonably priced and provides great results:


This is the 50mm f/1.8 II Autofocus Lens made by Canon, which can be found here (you can also find it at Amazon and a bunch of other places online). All of the pictures of my little one that you see on the blog were taken with this lens.

If you are wanting to invest a little money in a new camera, I cannot recommend the Canon Rebel enough! I'm still learning alot about my little Rebel, but in the past year I've picked up quite a bit, just playing around with it and taking lots of pictures of my cute little subject.

Oh, and a GREAT resource that I must rave about is Momtog. Drew is a very talented and lovely professional photographer who created Momtog as a site to provide information to those folks wanting to learn more about photography (not just moms). Drew did a great post on buying your first DSLR which can be found here.

Hope this helps!