Instantly Better Photos Just Arrived

All of the photos I've taken to put up on this site have a dirty secret. They've been taken with a camera phone or an old, cheap point and shoot. Honestly, I should be a bit more ashamed about it, because the whole time I've had a nice DSLR laying around (and several years of photography instruction to boot). This DSLR, in fact:

There's something hilarious to me about taking photos of my nice camera with my awful camera.

It's been a workhorse for me for many years. It's a Canon Rebel XTI. Not their most exciting or powerful model, but certainly enough for what I need. Before that, I had an older Canon SLR that used, if you can believe it, film (before that even, I used my father's old Canon which was made entirely of metal and the film had to be manually wound). I sold my older one to help pay for this baby, and luckily the lenses I had were compatible. Over the years, I have collected a nice assortment of goodies to go with it, including a wide angle and a telephoto lens. I have, however, been a neglectful mama, because somewhere in early 2010, I lost the charger and my main battery for it.

Being a poor college kid at the time, I couldn't just drop $120 on replacing them. So, I put it off and put it off and eventually it became last week. I found out the prices have significantly dropped for those items. My ever encouraging Hubs bought me the replacement charger and two new batteries (since my backup battery is stone dead) for a cool $60. These delights arrive today, and now I can do real photography again!

I threw one of the batteries in the charger and waited about as long as I could before tearing it out to pop in the camera, about fifteen minutes. I grabbed the first mini I could find, and did some test shots.

After trying to figure all the settings (I'm rustier than I remember), I eventually came away with a nice photo. I did run it through Photoshop to lighten the background up, but that's something I do all the photos to give them that nice, clean backdrop. It really helps the model stand out.

I'm so happy to have my camera back in working order. If I wasn't still under the weather, I'd run outside and start taking pictures of everything just to learn my way around it again. Hopefully it's like riding a bicycle, because learning all that stuff in the first place took quite a while.