Well, we finally bit the bullet and got ourselves a more than decent camera. Ever since the birth of our son, we've been scheming/plotting/saving to get a DSLR. He's only going to be a baby once, so we figure we owe it to him to document his early days utilizing the best 21st century tech we can vaguely afford to get our hands on.

We had a very nice Leica camera my Dad lent us, but we've learned one very valuable lesson with cameras and kids: speed is everything. Most non-SLR cameras simply aren't fast enough for little tykes, and the older they get, the faster they get.

Meaning: he's doing something cute that you want to document,  so you grab the camera and press the shutter. It better fire off a picture that exact instant. A second on the shutter, two seconds, three seconds, six seconds… no picture and he's not only not doing the cute thing anymore, he's gone. Toddled onward to something else. You missed it.

For the past three months or so since Leo's been more mobile, for every one cool moment we've managed to capture of him, there were 4 or more we missed. As he gets more and more mobile, that ratio can only get worse. Life's too short, man!

A good DSLR with a fast lens not only won't take 7 crucial seconds to take a photo, it'll take more than 7 photos in a single second. Now that's more like it!

We looked at several models, narrowed it to a choice between Nikon (D5100?) and Canon, and finally decided we're more Canon folks than Nikon. (We've had a couple nice point and shoots from Canon that served us well.) So after a bit of research, we decided on the Canon T3i body. 

The body is important, and I love the T3i, but a good lens is everything. Put a crappy lens on a good body=crappy photos. Put a decent lens on even a crappy body: you can still get good results. Probably like every shutterbug that's ever lived, it soon hits you: it's all about the glass. And it's lifelong: there's always better glass.

And so off we go. Always on the lookout for something that meets every qualification: wide open f stop, quality optics, lots of blades, and perhaps the most important thing: we can actually afford it since if it's really all that, it'll cost five, six, seven times what the camera body did. Put it this way, if the camera body and a good lens were about to go over a cliff and you could only grab one: you'd grab the lens. That's the kind of lens I'd love to have. Of course, I likely never will. 

So for now, (and far into the  foreseeable future or so) the type of lens mere mortals can afford is what we'll be using. So far, I'm in love with the 50mm 1.8 prime we got. I don't care for zooms much. I can tell I like primes.

Another thing I was happy to discover is the M42 mount. This lets you screw-mount old film camera lenses on a DSLR body. I picked up a 1960's vintage Pentax 55m lens from the Pasadena camera show for $25. The same lens would have cost $400+ in Canon EOS form. Older lenses are not only solidly built, but the optics are often stellar (ditto the blades) and you can get extreme wide f-stops like 1/4 and even 1/2. Some friends of mine at work have camera lenses from the 1940's and 50's they use on their modern DSLR cameras. I've seen some amazing results with them.

There are even some people that use 100 year old lenses on modern cameras! Great optical technology is far older than I would have guessed. I'm intrigued by the whole concept. Of course, the main compromise with using all older lenses is it's strictly manual, no auto-focus. But then, as the pros chide us mere noobs: who in their right mind buys a decent SLR to use it in auto mode anyway?

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