Catching up, a.k.a I'm really bad at this blogging thing

So. The holidays have come and gone since I've written anything in here. I am very much out of practice. Finding picturesque pieces of nature is much more difficult in the Oregon winter time in my neighborhood. It's wet a lot, and it's gray and the light is very dim and dreary much of the time. And there's fog. Fog makes things damp that I want to stay dry so I haven't taken the camera outside very much. I am actually suffering from a sort of withdrawal. I hate to wish for snow or ice so I will just be anxious for spring.

Two big things have happened recently though that are definitely worth mentioning. Without going into too much detail and allowing myself to get derailed, I am now the owner of not one, but two high-quality Canon cameras; a very excellent point and shoot, and the DSLR I have wanted since before they were actually available. The Fujifilm MX2900 Zoom I won in an online auction in 2002 and shot with up until October of 2007 was great for a long time. But it had minimal settings other than auto and I outgrew it quickly once I started trying to get the very best images possible out of my camera. These came from that camera and really made me believe I could do great things with better equipment:







Trying to upgrade cheaply and loving the style of pictures that have come out of Canon cameras, I first bought a Canon PowerShot S5IS. I fell in love. Really, it's a very good point-and-shoot camera. Excellent, in fact. I enjoyed the new, larger file sizes and the increased resolution instantly. I loved that it has a manual setting and I can set everything I want from the shutter speed to the f-stops to the ISO all the way up to 1600! That is incredible for a point and shoot camera. Not only that, but it shoots video at very good quality so I was able to videotape my son's winter band concert for the first time ever. Awesome. Love. It's a beautiful thing. These pictures came out of that camera and made me very happy indeed:









But, alas, something was still missing. There is no way I could have ever afforded to pay retail prices for any DSLR camera that had the features I was looking for, and by this time I had really done my research. I wanted a Canon EOS 40D so badly I could taste it (still do but am VERY happy to "only" have my 30D, but I'm getting ahead of myself). I would have settled for a 20D, even. Can't justify a 5D no matter how much my fingers twitch - haha!

I shot with the S5IS for over a month before finding the most incredible deal I could find (and have yet to see a better one, in fact, even though it came body only) on my beloved Canon EOS 30D from a local photographer. I was camera-rich and lens-poor for about two weeks. Two. Weeks! Holy crap. Thank goodness I had the S5IS to keep me from going batshit crazy. I shot over 1000 frames in the first two months of owning the S5IS - it was fall then and I was getting used to having so many settings to use. That really helped me when I finally got my hands on the 30D and the first lens to arrive, the 50mm f/1.8. I also ordered a 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 USMII lens, which arrived about a week after the 50mm. I made myself quit buying gear after I made sure I had everything to make both cameras functional and I have to be done for the foreseeable future. I totally understand the term "lens-lust" now though. Yikes. Some of the first images to come out of the 30D look like these and make me long for spring:







Now if the weather would only improve so that I could get myself outside more. I got brave the other day and decided to wrestle the camera, the dog, and the umbrella and try to find something to shoot. Mostly, I saw this:



I admit I am missing the flowers and sunshine. It is nice to know that with the holidays behind us Spring is not too far away.