A Payoff

As many of you know, Heather and I ended up being rather enthusiastic fans of Dave Ramsey program.

A sort of honesty-check moment came back in January, when we wanted to purchase a new camera. Rather than just boot the budget out for a month and buy the camera we started setting aside some money each month.

This past weekend we finally hit the threshold of “enough saved” plus “feeling like we might actually take advantage of the improved features” and decided to buy.

Heather and I are now the proud owners of a Canon Rebel Ti.

I hit the research fairly hard for a few days beforehand, and if your interested, dpreview is an amazing resource. What I found was, in short: It is really hard to go wrong, and really easy to get overwhelmed by information and choices.

I ended up aggressively steering Heather towards this camera primarily because the photography club we joined is made of largely of Canon fans. I figured there would be more people able to help explain the camera, and some of it’s features. We haven’t really figured out how to learn something together yet, so I am trying to leave as many options open for each of us to figure stuff out as possible.

My expectation was, that given the release of the Rebel T2i we would be able to find the Ti fairly cheap. Online it seems everyone else had the same idea, and I wasn’t finding much in the way of a deal. Saturday we made a trip over to the local photography shop with the idea that we should probably hold the camera a few times before we jumped in with both feet. Not only did we like the camera, but they had a rather attractive instant-rebate + second lens deal, making them more attractive than Amazon. The idea of having the rest of the weekend to play with the camera wasn’t too shabby ether 🙂

Having played with the camera for a day or two now, I cannot say enough good things about it. The only bad thing is it is so easy to squeeze off picture after picture (up to three a second!) we managed to create a huge pile of pictures that so far haven’t been sorted through.

The other downside is, as much as we thought we were starting understand photography better, it takes about two seconds to drown in menu options that we don’t understand. The wonderful counterpoint to that is simply that we don’t have to care, throwing the camera into “auto-mode” and shooting turns out better results than we probably deserve to be getting.

I feel a little bad not posing a picture of one of us, but we kind of looked like bums all weekend (or at least the times we had the camera in tow), so you will have to be content with a picture of my other weekend project:

I am rather proud of that too 🙂

-Jordan