About my “hobby”

I’ve always enjoyed taking pictures. While I’ve never been that person with the camera at every party, I can not go on vacation without a camera. A few years ago, I decided I wanted to do more than “point and shoot” but I wasn’t ready for an SLR yet. I decided to get the Canon Powershot S2, because while technically it is a point-and-shoot camera, it also had some optional lens converters and filters. Over the next year, I experimented with wide-angle/fisheye shots, and learned to love my polarizing filter. The telephoto converter never really did much good, and I didn’t need the UV filter to protect the lens so I never used it. That camera took some great pictures on bright sunny days. However, my fishtanks are one of my primary subjects, and the S2 just was not fast enough to avoid blur. Plus, it was starting to have focusing issues, it had never liked low light but now the problem was happening in daylight. So Friday Sep 22 2007, I put my Amazon prime membership to good use and ordered a Canon Digital Rebel XTi with the kit 18-55 lens. I used the same-day delivery for the camera, and on Saturday I packed an overnight bag and hit the road for a friend’s wedding, stopping along the way at Snoqualmie Falls, Lake Easton State park, and river overlooks on Highway 10 in Kittitas County to start learning how to use the camera. It’s a good thing I picked up a spare battery, because I took about 400 pictures that day, then stopped at the waterfront park in Des Moines at sunset the next day and took about 200 more. For the next three years I rarely went anywhere without my camera and at least one lens, usually more. During that time I upgraded a few lenses, picked up a few filters, and learned a lot. In late 2010, Canon announced their new 60D camera, which had, among other things, a rotating LCD screen. I’d had this before on my PowerShot S2, and it was a cool feature. So on the day the 60D was released, I headed down to Best Buy and grabbed one of the few available 60D kits. The kit lens went off to a friend on loan with my XTi, and I’ve put that rotating LCD (not to mention much, much better ISO performance) to good use a lot of times in the past year.