I had really wanted to get myself a dSLR for my birthday, but due to unforeseen circumstances, I didn’t have a big enough stack of pennies at the time. However, thanks to some more recent unforeseen circumstances, the pile of spare pennies got big enough, so I bought myself a Canon T1i. I had a very, very long debate with myself over what I wanted to get, as the 50D was my original goal, and still is… but I just couldn’t justify using that many pennies. So, I decided to get a high-end consumer camera (vs the prosumer class 50D) and spend the difference on lenses. The eternal Nikon vs Canon debate waged in my head, as the D5000 and the T1i have very similar specs and reviews. They’re both better than 10mp, (12.1 and 15.1, respectively), both shoot HD video, albeit at some strange framerates on both sides (24 at all resolutions for the Nikon, 30fps at 720p but only 20fps at 1080p for the Canon), and are priced very close to each other. What really decided it for me, was not either of these cameras, but that the fact that the D90 just doesn’t feel right in my hands when compared to the 50D. Thus, my ‘sometime down the road once I have all my duckies in a row’ upgrade camera decision was for Canon, meaning I should go with the T1i now so I can use all the lenses I collect between now and that somewhere off in the future upgrade date.
The 18-55mm kit lens that comes with the camera is pretty decent, and having a wide-angle option which I didn’t have when using Amanda’s 35-80mm lens is pretty nice. With the wide-angle, you can get really close to something and it still won’t overwhelm the frame:
At the other end of the lens’s zoom spectrum, you can get reasonably close as well. Considering the T1i is a 1.6 crop-factor camera due to the sensor size, the 55mm end of the kit lens translates to an 88mm lens attached to a regular 35mm film camera, so that’s at least at the grey area at the start of ‘telephoto’ lens focal lengths. What a little zoom means is that I can get a bit closer without disturbing the subject:
The above frame was a partial crop from a larger image, but that brings me to the other benefit of the new electronophotobox over Amanda’s XT: megapixels, an extra 6.9 of them to be precise (15.1 vs 8.2). The above image is a resized 5.7mp chop out of the center of the native 15.1mp image, and it still has better detail than my SD850IS point-n-shoot. Of course a large portion of the detail capability of a dSLR depends on the lens, and like I said, the kit lens is at least decent in this regard. I would LOVE to have a 70-200mm F2.8 L-series lens like one of the guys at the car show last weekend did, but I think I’ll be okay if I can manage to pick up the used 75-300 F4-5.6 zoom I found on Craigslist tomorrow after church. Anywho, the kit lens is reasonably fast, allowing wide-aperture blurring of non-focal depth stuff like the window screen in this shot:
And being a bit faster than Amanda’s 35-80mm (though not as fast as her 50mm F2.5 prime macro lens), it can do pretty decent shallow depth-of-field stuff like I talked about in my last photography post. I’ve recently joined a group of folks on facebook who do weekly amateur photo projects (in addition to the Facebook Phocus group, which is a bit more advanced), with each week’s theme being a color. For this week’s project, I tried shooting some cactus, but since it was overcast the green was kinda bleh and grey, so I did up a composition of my bright green guitar pic instead:
Again, while not as fast as Amanda’s 50mm prime, I like the bokeh from this lens in the out-of-focus areas better.
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