camera love

Been taking pictures of our daily events today, it’s so fun having a nice camera again!

Sophie is SO in love with this little booklet that came in her Snow White movie, it has all sorts of Disney Princess paraphernalia for her to oogle and memorize.  She really wants the princess clock and Snow White vacuum.  It goes with her EVERYWHERE!

Tessa had refried beans for lunch today. I know she likes the idea of utensils, because she always asks for them.  But the texture of food is too tempting not to experience with those chubby fingers!  I catch her just massaging her food all the time and have to remind her to eat.

This new basketball game was the source of a couple hours entertainment.  Tessa chuckles like a fat man while Sophie bounces up and down.  My heart fizzes and pops when I see those 2 enjoying each others’ company, it’s the greatest!

Note (this is for you Erika): I used my 50mm lens for all of these pictures in Av mode and I’m pretty sure my f stop was 1.8 the whole time.   My shutter speed was pretty slow around 1/60- 1/120.  I am proud to say that my ISO was pretty darn high for these photos, the lowest I had it was 400 and for the basketball pictures it was at 3200!  The reason I am proud of this is because they are surprisingly not noisy (quiet?) for that high of an ISO, something my old camera was TERRIBLE at!  The WB was on auto but I had to correct it to tungsten for the bathroom pictures.

**WARNING** the following paragraph will only be interesting if you are a photographer, the rest of you may just want to stop here (and leave a comment).

So my new camera is considered a “semi-professional” camera which means it’s bigger and heavier (and much more expensive) than the Rebel series.  Luckily my old camera was a dinosaur and not much different in size and weight that the new guy (yes, I think it’s a boy).  It’s bigger and heavier for a reason though, it’s got a lot more POWER!  My first favorite is how stinking fast it can shoot.  It’s seriously astounding to casually press the shutter button and have it snap 6 pictures just like that.  I think the technical spec says it does 6.5 fps (frames per second).  Isn’t that totally awesome!  Other “semi-pro” upgrades include:

• longevity – it’s graded to take 100,000 shots while the Rebels aka “prosumer cameras” are graded to 10,000 before repairs are needed
• toughness – he’s made of metal instead of plastic plus the compartments for the battery and memory card are dust and water proof
• sharper – all 9 of the focus points cross type where as in the prosumer line only the middle point has that precision
• faster – as I mentioned above it shoots significantly faster and for longer bursts (up to 75 jpegs in one burst) as well as a higher max shutter speed
• control – there are more things you have control over in this camera like kelvin values for your white balance, for example, personally I am excited to just have flash exposure compensation!  Can you believe my old one didn’t even have THAT!?
• ISO range – it can go up higher in the ISO making low light photography possible and with less digital noise

I’m sure there are more differences I am not aware of; the the longevity was the selling point for me!  It lasts 10 times as long!!  I just take so many pictures.  So yeah, clearly I am in love with my new camera!  I hope the influx of pictures doesn’t crash my blog, or worse, my computer…