Becoming a Rebel

A Canon Rebel, that is!

For the longest time, I have envied pictures taken by friends and members of the blogging world who own fancy shmancy D-SLR cameras. Every time I broached the subject with Scott, however, we came to the same conclusion: we can't afford or justify spending $500+ on a camera. We bought a new Canon Power Shot last year and have been really happy with it. So, as many times as I've come back to the subject, I've always decided to ultimately let it go. 

Until a few weeks ago!

Friends of ours upgraded to a newer model camera and were selling their older but still spectacular Canon Rebel for less than half of what we would have spent on a new one. Their camera is in impeccable shape, and it happens to be the same one that my sister-in-law Katie owns, so we know it's a good one. Scott couldn't refuse! This fancy shamncy camera is now ours!

If I'm being honest, the first time I turned it on was a pretty intimidating moment. I have so much to learn. Thankfully, with the help of some pretty awesome books that came with it, I've been able to play around and slowly but surely come up with some snapshots that I'm simply in love with.

The first pictures I took were using a flash, and most of them were at night or on a cloudy day indoors. I was expecting to completely hate all of them, but oh, was I wrong. There's no overblown lighting, no overly saturated color hues... what you see is what you get!

The next group of pictures were all taken late morning, inside, using nothing but natural light and a few basic camera settings. I can't get over how wonderful they look!!

Curtains I made for our bedroom a while back... perhaps I can now post a tutorial since I have a camera that can actually capture them in our cave of a bedroom?

Finally, I took a few of my favorite shots and enhanced them a bit using PicMonkey. I'm thinking about adding  the newest Photoshop Elements to my Christmas wish list, but for now this free site does just fine. Scott isn't a fan of tweaking pictures all the time, and to be honest, I don't think any of these even need it. Playing around with photography is just fun. What can I say!

This one was done by the same sweet friend who sold us her camera. She's a professional. ;)

This was a picture-heavy post... I know. I just couldn't help myself, though! You can probably expect now until Christmas to be about the same, and then of course the baby is arriving the end of February... so yeah. Just expect a LOT more pictures in the immediate future. ;)