Pictures

I hate photos of people kissing. They make me pret-ty uncomfortable. Really. But our mouths are missing, so this is fine, right? Also, we’ve definitively decided that the flash makes Isaiah’s head look weird. But have you ever held a huge DSLR at arm’s length to take a photo? It’s rough.

Some folks asked us about the camera we got, so I’ll share.

Ten years ago, my mom bought an APS-film SLR – a Canon Rebel EOS. I don’t know which of those things are important to identifying a camera, so I just included them all.

Have you needed APS film recently? The clerks at Walgreens, CVS, Wal-mart, Target, even Wolf Camera and specialty stores just stared at us like we were lepers when we asked them if they had it. We were shamed…laughed out of stores…pointed at. APS film has been hard to find for almost three years. Some stores have it, others don’t. Eventually, recently, we couldn’t find it anywhere. Isaiah is into his photography courses in school now and he needed film for a project and we hit a dead end.

Not one nearby location had the film. We called every pharmacy and Wolf Camera within 45 miles.

We decided then that it was time to join the rest of the 21st century in the 21st century and get a DSLR. After months of scouring the web for good deals (we had an inkling before we hit our dead end that we were going to need to buy one), we decided we couldn’t really afford a DSLR at the time. When we were out of film? We had no choice.

Luckily, because we had the lenses from our Canon Rebel, we knew we would get a used Canon Rebel digital body to keep costs low. We happened upon a pretty rad find – I’ll share the specifics later, because I don’t speak camera-language yet – for $200. Also, I don’t really want to get involved in the whole, “What equipment are you using?” conversation, because I already have a bad case of Keeping-Up-with-the-Jones’. Who are the Jones’, and why do they make me feel so bad about my possessions?

Anyway, we got lucky.

Until I know what model and year and all of that (is it a car or a camera?), all I can say is that I love it. I miss my film. I knew the manual settings of my old camera. I have to relearn these. But digital allows you to make mistakes so we can take more photos and not wonder, “Is this photo going to be worth $0.50 to me?”

With the risk of getting involved in the whole equipment conversation, what kind of camera do you use?

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We’re not photographers. We just like taking photos. It’s calming and it’s something to work toward getting better at. This weekend, we finally bought a (used) DSLR. We’ve only ever used film. It’s fun learning the manual settings all over again and we want to give ourselves some kind of motivation to keep learning and trying new things.

We’re gonna share the results of our weekend experiments with you in a weekly series. Sound good? Good.

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