Its alive! Its astounding!

The big brown truck made good on my tracking number's promises this morning. I opened up the box with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation-- ordering online for the first time from any place I've never shopped with before is cause for nervousness. But everything was there, boxed up very nicely and all in the original packaging. Therefore I can share with you all the exact link to the package deal I got, and advise you that you can order your very own 40d package deal from the folks at Digicombos with confidence.

Digicombos Canon40d

When I opened the lens up I was in for a surprise-- the good kind. The lens that comes with the $800 combo was simply advertised as an 18-55mm lens, and I figured it was probably a cheapo throwaway lens, because this package deal costs exactly one dollar more than the body itself does at many other online retailers. Nope, the lens is an EFS model that even features image stabilization and costs $175 if purchased seperately. Score! Here's a review of the lens itself.

EFS 18-55mm F3.5-56

So, like a kid on Christmas with his long-desired new toy in hand, I scanned through the quick start guide, put memory chips, batteries, and lenses in place, and bounded downstairs with a spring in my step looking for anything to take a picture of. I decided I'd try to take some closeups at first, just to test out the focus limits of the EFS lens, which is not a "macro" model at all.

A Playstation controller sitting on the couch was my first victim. I realized that as long as I can get pretty close to my subject, the sheer size of the raw images generated by this 10.1 megapixel camera will allow me to crop quite a bit instead of resizing if I want, thus making the subject appear huge if that's what I want to do. Like this:


I spied a wasp on the carpet near the front door. He seemed friendly enough so I snapped away at him as well. In exchange for his being such a good model for me, I declined to smash him flat or vaccum him up after I was done.


I took the camera with me to work, and in the late afternoon ran to the bicycle and skateboard shop across the street from my office. Kevin, the proprietor of said shop, was willing to do some bicycle tricks for me so I could try out the "sport" mode of the camera. At 6.5 frames per second I generated more than 50 images while capturing three tricks. Sport mode worked like a charm, I'm hooked.




Having played with some of the automatic "dummy" settings I decided to delve into the semi-automatic settings that bridge the gap between the easy presets and the fully manual controls. On the way to dinner I had some fun with the shutter speed priority mode, which automatically adjusts the aperture of the lens to compensate for a manually set shutter speed. Traveling in a moving car while experimenting with very slow shutter speeds of a full second or more resulted in a few fun shots. Taking a photo of a car traveling the same speed as ours, with a shutter speed of a full second, an ISO of 400 and an aperture of F8 resulted in a photo reminiscent of about a thousand magazine ads I've seen:


After dinner I convinced my wife to stop by a local car dealership so I could play for a minute with the flash override and see how good the light gathering of the camera was in a parking lot at night. Auto dealership parking lots are pretty well lit, but I thought it would still be a bit of a challenge to take some decent pics with no flash at all. A very clean Challenger SRT awaited me in its black-on-black glory. Perfect. I found that I got better results using manual focus with IS enabled than by using the autofocus. One day when I grow up and get a real job, I want to drive to the court in a car like this one:


Alas, I will be driving a Civic with 216,000 miles showing on the odometer to court tomorrow morning for a 9am docket. So its way past time to stop blogging, and start sleeping.

I won't have the Canon 40d nestled under my arm tonight like Ralphie with his Daisy BB gun. That spot is reserved for a particularly lovely woman who is already downstairs waiting for me.