Canon 40d Battery Grip

I picked up this Canon 40d battery grip a while back…and while it makes my camera look really cool and professional, it’s a bit overkill for my needs. Don’t get me wrong, it looks, feels and performs flawlessly, but there aren’t may occasions where I’ll need to be able to shoot 2000 raw photographs without changing batteries.

For $150.00 it’s a bargain accessory and it fits your camera like a glove. It does add a little weight, but it really balances out the camera. It’s actually easier to carry by hand because its so well design ergonomically. Just the fact that they added an additional shutter button to the unit for vertical shots makes it worth the price.

I’m doing a Caribbean vacation in a few months and I know I’ll be taking this with me.

Nikon vs. Canon

Which is better? Nikon or Canon?

I had no idea. I still don’t.

I did a lot research. I studied all of the heated online debates. I read all of the Amazon.com reviews. And I ultimately went with Canon.

After all of my research,  both brands seemed fairly easy to use, they were both were around the same price point, and all of the reviews seemed to rank the camera speed, options, and body construction about equally.

After all that, it basically came down to building a system or “rig” and deciding which company I was going to invest all of my money in. Canon is one of the oldest and most respected camera manufacturers in the world. They seemed to have more options, so I went with Canon.

Basically, though, I think that you can take a good picture with any modern digital camera, even a cell phone camera, if you know what you’re doing (and I’m still figuring it out).

Don’t let the camera take the pictures

I’m already learning that, while shooting in “auto-mode” gives me what I want 80% of the time, I really need to learn how to understand and control the camera so that it takes the shots that *I* want, and I can’t just let the camera make the decisions *for* me. I totally get that modern SLR’s are intentionally designed to make the best image quality decisions automatically, but I really need to learn the ‘foundations’ of photography to get the shots that I want. The camera can’t just automatically decide what kind of shot I want. Do I want freeze an action shot or do I want it blurred to suggest motion? When I take a portrait, do I want the background in focus or not? The camera can’t tell what I’m thinking…what my “vision” is for the shot. I nned to tell it what to do. I just picked up a book called “Exposure Photo Workshop: Develop Your Digital Photography Talent” to learn more about controlling exposure. I’ll do a book report when I’m done.

Things I am learning about my Canon 40D

I’m learning a lot about my new Canon 40D. For one thing, there is a whole new vocabulary to get familiar with when switching over to digital. For instance, I didn’t know what “EOS” stood for. Turns out it means, “electro-optical system” and it’s just a name for Canon’s line of auto-focus-capable SLR cameras, not really a photography term at all!

Obviously everyone knows what SLR and ISO stand for, but here are a few that were new to me:

• AF: Auto Focus
• EF: A series of lenses from Canon that fit my camera, also includes the EF-S and EF-M
• CF: Compact Flash
• WB: White Balance
• IS: Image Stabilizer

Here are a few more things I learned:

• The battery drains faster when you use the LCD monitor, image stabilization, and auto-focus a lot.
• When using a flash, image stabilization should be turned off or it screws things up.
• For whatever reason, pressing the AF-ON button when it is set to one of the creative zones does the same thing as pressing the shutter halfway.

Minolta SRT 101

Shot with a Canon 40D ISO 400 f5.6 1/100

I thought my first post should be a photo of the camera that got me interested in photography to begin with; my Minolta SRT 101. This is the camera I used throughout high school and college. This a fully manual all metal camera that feels really solid in your hands. It’s still a real workhorse. This is the same camera that photojournalist W. Eugene Smith used for his famous Tomoko in Her Bath photograph.