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I just purchased my own Digital Rebel, which I have been coveting for eight months at least. My father, who has always been a photography buff, has owned one about that long, and kindly let me try his out for a sample portrait shoot a few months ago. My husband also singled it out as probably ideal for my purposes (and within our price range, which is possibly more important!)
My previous portrait shoots were carried out with a Canon A-1 passed on from my father. That's a great camera with a lot of capability, and I got four beautiful lenses along with it, but when you're shooting lively children, the lack of an autofocus is a BIG liability, IMO. I learned photography on a Konica SLR thirty years ago, so I'm pretty comfortable with them, but on a professional level, paying for processing and printing eight or ten rolls of film for every shoot was getting out of hand.
I'm a digital fiend anyway because of my computer graphics background. My previous digital camera, a 2.1 megapixel Olympus, has all the quick shooting features, but a fairly short lens that distorts portrait shots. I intensely dislike stopping to change rolls of film and missing good shots. And I need to get everything into the computer as an intermediate step anyway, No matter how my photos were shot, I usually work from one 8.5x11 color inkjet print, a couple of grayscales adjusted for detail in light areas and dark areas, and one three-value posterized printout. So my instinct was to upgrade to a decent digital with SLR features.
I have the standard lens that comes with the Digital Rebel. So far I've used it for a number of experiments and one shoot last Friday with a ten-year-old girl. She wanted to bring her kite to the park where we shot, and I have a number of pictures of her running around and rather small in the distance. There I was wishing for a telephoto zoom, or the ability to keep up with a ten-year-old!
But otherwise the 18-55 zoom is good for my purposes. Lovely crisp images, nice color. I obviously haven't figured out all the shooting modes, because I keep getting underexposed shots, but that's all right; I take them into Photoshop and brighten them up.
For accessories, I have two 512 meg Compact Flash cards and an extra battery. My old card reader won't deal with the newer Compact Flash cards, unfortunately. So I will have to find one that does, because downloading two hundred JPGs to my hard drive with the USB cable takes an hour and eats up all the charge in the battery!
Laura
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