2003-07-03 - 12:56 a.m.

I Heart My New Camera

I've spent the last few days reading and tinkering with my new Canon EOS-10d digital camera. I'm as happy with it as I expected to be. I'm still climbing the learning curve, and I've already lost some shots due to stupid mistakes. For example, the new camera has a "continuous focus" mode, meant to allow you to hold the focus point on a moving subject and take pictures quickly. I tried this while Liralyn ran through sprinklers, and got some promising shots. (Promising meaning they weren't good, but I could see that with practice I could develop the ability to take good pictures in that mode.) Then I went inside, pointed the camera at Liralyn and let it focus, then recomposed and shot. Of course, after I recomposed, the focus point was on the chair in the background, and the camera automatically focused as the focus point moved, so I got a very out-of-focus Liralyn in the foreground and a nice sharp chair leg in the center of the frame. Whups. You can't fix that in Photoshop.

That didn't get me down, though, because of all the new things I can do, and the annoyances I'm free of. No more having to manually set the apeture on the flash, no more flash pictures ruined by the crappy Coolpix flash controller, no more shots that looked in focus but totally weren't. Instead I get fast, accurate focusing and the full range of Canon lenses. I'm pretty stoked about the new IS lens I got today. "IS" means "image stabilization", which in turn means that the lens is suspended in a housing and kept stable even when you have minor shaking in your hands. This tremendously increases the range of useful pictures you can take. Setting the camera to ISO 3200, I was able to take a handheld picture of Julie indoors with no flash and a 35mm-equivalent zoom of about 215mm. I've never owned a camera that had a prayer of doing anything like that. It just amazed me.

I am stoked. Hear me roar.

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