A Payoff

Posted on by Jordan

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

Photography

Posted on by Jordan

One of the topics that has continued to come up as Heather and I search for more things we enjoy doing together is photography.

Until now we haven’t really done much with that information, other than say “we should figure out a way to get more into photography together”

As of a few days ago, we are now proud members of the Des Moines Camera Club.

We attended one meeting to try and get a feel for the club, and were really impressed by how friendly the long time members were. To say that they are more knowledgeable than we are about the subject is an understatement, but they were friendly and happy to talk about their hobby.

The speaker at our first meeting was a nature photographer with an incredible portfolio of work. While he could still be considered amateur, many of his pictures have been published in books and magazines.

I was really impressed by his work. Neither Heather nor I are really interested in doing nature photography per say, but it was still really interesting to have someone that good at the craft tell us about some of his work.

On a tangent, it was hard to ignore that the speaker was retired, and therefore had a much more flexible schedule to work with. I guess the lesson to take away from that is he put in a lot of time learning the skills needed to take good pictures over the years, and now that he has the time to really dig in and wait for that perfect shot he can get great pictures!

I think we are going to quickly find that Heather and I have drastically different interests within the broad scope of “photography” but at least it gives us something to talk about 🙂

We have been putting aside a little money each month to eventually buy a nice camera (did someone say Dave Ramsey?).  After one meeting with this club, I am a little concerned about fast you could burn cash with the hobby. Heather seems committed to the idea of not buying until her talents surpass the cameras we have now, but there seems to be a pretty substantial leap from the point-and-shoot models we have and what most people at the club are running. Maybe we can pick up last years model from somebody or something.

Whatever camera we end up using, and whatever topics we end up photographing, hopefully we can post some interesting stuff here over the next year!

-Jordan