dragonlady7

So. Wandered around various electronics stores this afternoon, testing out different digital cameras.

Really what it came down to was a contest of wills between the Canon Digital Rebel and the Canon Digital Elph.
Why?

The Elph epitomizes everything I could want in a point-and-shoot. It's the one I took the wedding photos with-- the one Katy and Adam bought. It's small, very compact, very portable. It's sturdy. It's got a lot of settings. I was able to actually get a wide range of shots with it, and managed to figure out how to use the settings to achieve the effects I wanted with some of those shots. I liked it. It was cute.

The Rebel. Well, it's an SLR. It's like my old film SLRs. It takes pictures when you ask it to. It lets you focus it yourself. It lets you decide the shutter speed and so on, if you prefer. It lets you play with things. And it shows you exactly what it's going to take a picture of when you look through the viewfinder.

In the end, I found that I really liked playing with the Rebel. I quickly got to know more about it than the apathetic and underaged employees, which was a ton of fun. I got it to go on manual, I got it to autofocus. I played with the shutter speed. I couldn't master the interface for the ISO. The bastards wouldn't let me look at the instruction booklet.

On the whole, it pleased me.

So, Dave and I went home (of course) and shopped around for the cheapest one on the Internet. We found one for less than half the list price, but did a quick Googke of the store and found out they were shysters. (They'll sell you the camera real cheap, but if you don't buy ridiculously overpriced accessories to go along with it, they'll never actually ship it to you. According to a dozen different customer review sites.)
So in the end, it came down to the identically-priced J&R (they of the awesome superstore in Lower Manhattan) and B&H (they who sold me my last camera). J&R was offering free shipping-- a savings of $15-- so we went with them. Shrug. Other than that we figured it didn't matter.

So, I'm going to be getting a digital SLR this week, and I will henceforth be unstoppable. :)
Anyone who wants me to love them forever is encouraged to buy me a Canon EOS zoom lens, or a 256 or more MB Compact Flash memory card. :) (It comes with a lens, but it doesn't zoom much. And I already have a memory card, but it's little.)

Watch this space for some hopefully awesome photos of Buffalo, my house, and the environs. However, I am strongly discouraged from continuing my series of photos of Dave sleeping, so there may not be any more of those. :(

I really hope to be able to get more serious about my photos. I was never a serious photographer, merely prolific, but I think I had developed rather a nice style by dint of sheer perseverance. I should post my collection of photos from Europe (all taken with my ancient Fujica SLR-- the thing is indestructible, but the light meter is sucking ass right now and probably screwed up all my pretty Letchworth photos).
I want to get back into that, into taking pictures because they're pretty rather than taking pictures simply because something is happening. I used to carry the SLR with me everywhere, and I would spend fifteen minutes on a park bench in Edinborough setting up a good shot of Waverley Station or lying on a rock in Ireland trying to properly frame Cashel. I would like to do that to Buffalo, which is in its own horrid way a very photogenic little city. And I just can't really do that with any of the point-and-shoots I've had so far. Yes, I would bring the Elph everywhere if I had it, in my pocket or in my purse, but would I ever get it out? I brought the DX-3900 everywhere too, and what do I have to show for it? 3,000 photos of mediocre quality, of mundane events and scenery.

So, since I love taking pictures so much, I should go a little farther and actually try taking it seriously.