Babbling Blueberry

A prize goes to whoever can guess what this photo is of. (If you will be using one of these yourself soon, you do not qualify for this contest. I know who you are!)

I’ve collected a bunch of advice from different sources and I think I’ve narrowed the choices down enough to make a decision about a digital SLR body and initial lens to purchase. Here’s a summary of the most influential information that I collected in case it helps anyone making a similar decision.

Nikon and Canon have the most lenses available for their cameras. And I learned that you can rent very good lenses for a small fraction of the cost of buying one. So that’s very good for lenses that I’d only use occasionally or lenses that I wanted to try before buying. This makes the decision to switch to a dSLR much more palatable. But based on the availability of lenses, the field gets narrowed to only Nikon and Canon.

One person told me that he decided on Nikon because he knew a lot of people who already have Nikon cameras and lenses and he could borrow lenses from them. I’m not in the same situation. Another person told me that she went with Canon because their products tend to be cheaper and she couldn’t tell any difference in quality. That’s probably the boat that I’m in.

The most to-the-point advice I got online was from David Sifry. He suggested the Canon Digital Rebel XT 350D camera body (why do they have to have so many different parts to the name?) and a Canon 50 mm / f1.4 USM lens - good starting equipment that would still allow me to have very high image quality. The most compelling reason to get this setup is that it works well in low light situations and would allow me to get away from washing out my subjects with flash (camera has low noise at high ISO settings and lens has large maximum aperture).

I also learned that many people use this lens for the large majority of their photos. So that reassures me that I’d get a lot of use out of this single lens. Another appealing feature of this lens is that it has autofocus, but I can also manually tweak the focus myself without switching entirely out of autofocus (full-time manual focusing). This lens is a prime lens (no zoom), which would give me a higher quality lens for less money. To get the same quality in a zoom lens, I’d have to pay a lot more money. So I’d rather zoom with my feet (it’s free!) than pay more money to be lazy. There will probably be situations where I can’t move my feet (cliffs, wedding ceremonies), but I can always crop photos later if I want. And I can also invest in additional lenses later (I’m guessing that my priorities would be wide-angle for landscapes and macro or lens extenders for macro shots, but we’ll see).

I decided to look into the more recent version of the Canon Rebel XT, the XTi. Just to see if I thought that any of their features would be worthwhile (XTi is currently about $100 - $150 more expensive). Here are some links: Good evaluation of XT. Good evaluation of XTi. Good and thorough review of XTi that includes comparisons with XT, and also includes a nice table of the main differences.

The most appealing improvements in the XTi:

• Multi-pronged approach to fighting dust. This would make it easier to take good care of the camera and it would be really good for being able to change lenses with less worry while hiking or traveling.
• Larger LCD
• Better interface. I’m pretty good at getting used to interfaces, even when they’re not good. But I do enjoy a good interface. And if it makes taking pictures more efficient, sign me up!
• Eye sensor to turn LCD off when you look through viewfinder. So you can setup your shots without the light from the LCD getting in the way! Clever!
• (10 Mpixel resolution vs 8 Mpixel. The pros and cons of this improvement probably cancel each other out. It’ll help to be able to crop photos and still have enough resolution left. But it’ll make it more of a pain to upload and download them.)

These are all features that I would take advantage of so I eventually decided to go with the XTi aka 400D. The extra cost may even payoff in the long run (dust control). Cannon has announced that there will be an even newer version - XSi aka 450D. (The main addition to this version is having a live view on the LCD. I don’t mind looking through the viewfinder so I don’t need this feature. ) But hopefully the release of this new model will cause the prices of the XTi aka 400D to go down soon. I was planning to wait a few months before purchasing everything, so the timing should be perfect.

That’s the decision process that I went through, but if your situation is different from mine or you want more information, the Digital SLR Guide was very useful for guiding people through the camera selection process based on their photography personalities needs. It also has very good explanations of camera terminology.

Hopefully, future posts will include photos from this new camera setup!  I’m so excited!

There are a number of great hikes in the Bay Area, but I think a lot of them start to look the same after you’ve been on a few of them and covered the range of landscapes. So I thought that I had exhausted the geography and flora that the Bay Area has to offer. I was wrong! I went to Pinnacles National Monument near Hollister and had an awesome day of hiking! I went with a group of 8 people, all of them happy and funny and wonderful. We had such a great time that we all applauded after we emerged from our hike. The landscape is a little like parts of Arches National Park, but it’s got Californian vegetation. And they have caves, though they are actually more like crevices between rocks that have been filled with other rocks. The light filtered in between the rocks and it was a really beautiful and cool experience to walk through the caves a.k.a. crevices between rocks that have been filled with other rocks.

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Speaking of light, I’ve been thinking more and more about investing in a digital SLR. There are a lot of photos that I would like to take, but I know they won’t come out because of the limitations of my camera - difficulties w/ low light, slow response time, etc.. I can control the aperture and exposure time, but that’s difficult to navigate through the menus. And the range that I can cover and the lens are still limiting - I can never get the depth of field that I’d like to get. A bunch of the happy, funny, wonderful people had digital SLRs and they seemed to be happily snapping away, and I kept wondering how much more I could do if I had different camera equipment. I found this website that has a buying guide for beginner digital SLR users… I wonder if it’s sound advice. It all seems reasonable, but the monetary investment would be so huge that I don’t want to make a decision lightly. I’ve determined that the camera body is not so important and the lens(es) that you use matter much more, but I have no idea what sort of lens(es) I’d need to cover the photography situations that I will encounter. Any words of wisdom out there for me?

Here are some of the photos that I was able to take with my camera. I wish I could show you all the other photos that I was imagining. The theme of these photos is “Optical Illusions.”

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These are actually large rocks and a regularly sized tree. It would have been pretty disappointing to see a puny pile of rocks:

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Don’t they look like they’re really high up? They did do a good job getting up, but the height at which they appear to be in the photo is mostly from the camera angle:

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This is a photo (taken by Swedish Fish) of me and Laughing Ophthalmologist, who does not usually tower over me like this. Also, notice how she has a huge smile on her face. Maybe it’s because her digital SLR gives the illusion of a huge smile. Actually, the smile is not an illusion, she actually is like this in person!:

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For anyone interested in going on this hike, we started at the Bear Gulch Visitor Center.

We started on the Condor Gulch Trail (across the road from the Visitor Center and the trail starts at the little bridge), which has a constant but moderate uphill climb and a good view of High Peaks. (1.7 mi)

When we hit the T-intersection with High Peaks Trail, we took a left. This part of the trail went up and down through the High Peaks. Very good views of the hills and valleys surrounding the peaks. Since it’s March, the hills were really green. I would imagine that it wouldn’t be as nice of a view in the summer or fall. (0.6 mi)

We then stayed on the High Peaks Trail for the Steep and Narrow section. This is a decent description of this section, but it’s not more strenuous than other parts of the route. There’s a bathroom at the end of this section. (0.7 mi)

Taking the “left” option at the bathroom, we continued on the High Peaks Trail (1.5 mi).

We took a small detour loop (go left) on the Rim Trail which takes you to the lovely surprise Bear Gulch Reservoir. (0.4 mi)

You can then take the Bear Gulch Cave Trail through the previously described “caves” or you can take the high road and bypass the caves on a parallel route. Sleepy Weasel and Runs With Head Down say that you can hear everything that is said in the cave very clearly. Watch what you say. (0.7 mi)

We merged back with the Moses Spring Trail… (0.2 mi)

That takes us back to the Bear Gulch Trail on which we walked along the road back to where we had parked our cars at the Bear Gulch Visitor Center. (0.3 mi)

The whole route was 6.1 mi and it took us about 4 hours. I wasn’t actually really keeping track of time so the this is a huge estimate.