About 2 months or so ago, I was able to pickup what I consider to be my first “real” camera: a used Canon Rebel XTi with a 1.4 50mm fixed lens. So far, I’ve been blown away by how awesome it is. One of the things that had been driving us crazy was how slow the point and shoot we had was. Trying to catch Brenden or any other toddler doing something wasn’t possible. They just moved too fast.

Enter the XTi. It’s super fast and can take photos as fast as I can hit the button or in bursts of 3 a second or so. I can easily catch Brenden doing what he does and not worry that I’m going to miss the opportunity for the shot.

The camera shoots in RAW format at 10 Megapixels. These are big files coming off the camera. To compare, our P&S has a 2 GB card in it, at it’s highest quality ( 7 Megapixel ), the card holds almost 800 pictures. The XTi in RAW can only put 200 pictures on the same card.

I have two examples of some shots I’ve gotten that I really like and I think show off the camera and lens some.

This is a shot of Brenden staring off at the TV. I really like how the picture captures the light from the TV hitting off his eyes.

This shot is an example of how quickly the camera can get itself together. This was at a birthday party for one of our friend’s kids. I was sitting on the sidewalk when this baby runs up to me. I wanted to get a shot of him because I loved the color of his eyes, so I brought the camera up and shot as fast as it would go and this is what turned out. I really like it.

I’ve already found myself taking more and more pictures that I used to. The trick now is to delete the ones that aren’t so good and only keep the ones that are worth it. I should be posting more photos now since there will hopefully be a lot better selection for me to choose from.