Antuan Kinnard

Fun with the Rebel

After almost a year of debating whether I should or shouldn't, I finally purchased my first dSLR camera - the Canon EOS 350D a.k.a. Digital Rebel XT. I've been doing a ton of photography research and kept saying that I'd get it one day. Well, I finally put my money where my mouth is. Turns out that putting your money where your mouth is can be more expensive than you would think. I thought I could just purchase the camera, a lens, and some memory (256 at the most). Although you could work with this, you will most likely want to upgrade and expand your inventory soon if you're serious.  Upon purchase, I got the camera, 2 lenses, memory, and a tripod. I still needed a lens hood, polarizer, UV filter, ND filter, more memory, flash, camera bag and a few other things.  I never knew that there were so many things to buy.

My first milestone was actually deciding on which camera. All along I knew that the Rebel was the camera I was going to get but then I thought I'd take a look around.  I looked at the Nikon D50, the Nikon D70s and the Canon EOS 20D. My decision suddenly became a little more difficult as the Nikons are much cheaper than their Canon counterparts. In the end, I chose the Rebel because 1) the Nikons were 2 megapixels less than the Rebel (this is a big deal because I do a fair amount of cropping) and the 20D was about $400 more than the Rebel.

One of the biggest challenges was finding a decent 'walk around' lens. A walk around lens would allow me to take a large range of pics without changing lenses all the time. Being new to photography, this was a daunting task as there are so many lenses, lens reviews and lens tests out there. And if that wasn't enough, I came across some tests which were done incorrectly yielding incorrect results. So to start, I came up with a list of things I had to have without compromising image quality too much. After a few iterations, my lens requirements simply came down to:

1. good image quality
2. good performance in low light situation
3. wide angle range
4. decent telephoto range
5. all-purpose (for those times when I don't wanna carry around a ton of lenses)
6. not too expensive

After all my research, I finally decided on the Canon 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM and Canon 50mm 1.8 lenses. The 28-135 addresses numbers 1, 4, 5 and somewhat 6 requirements while the 50mm addresses 1, 2 and 6. Even though I haven't addressed 3 yet, I was very successful in meeting my requirements overall.

For my budget, I think I made some good decisions. Without going into any technical details, image quality has been very good from what I've seen so far. All of the problems I've seen so far has been user error (go figure). In an attempt to get more comfortable with it, I took it on a test run to the 2006 Chicago Auto Show. It performed really well and I actually enjoyed snapping away. Since I obviously picked the worst day to go to the show so I wasn't able to get too creative as I kept it on Av Mode most of the time. One of the good things about dSLR cameras is that the images they produce can take a good deal of punishment (without losing losing much image data) from Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.NET, or whatever you use. Good thing too because I didn't set the correct white balance (causing red and/or yellow casts) and had to adjust my pics through photoshop. If I had had a larger memory card, I could have shot in RAW format and changed the white balance after the fact without any loss in image data. I'm not an expert yet, but you can take a look at a few of my first Rebel pics at the Chicago Auto Show.