As previously mentioned, the Canon Rebel XT DSLR was purchased in July, 2006. I've been using the "kit lens", which is an EF-S 18-55mm f3.5/5.6. Quality-wise, this is a great improvement over the Fuji (which did surprisingly well for a fixed-lens camera). I have found, however, that the 55mm maximum does not really provide a sufficiently long zoom capability, so I've ordered an EF 28-135mm f3.5/5.6 IS USM lens.
The "IS" stands for Image Stabilizer. It has a little gyroscope inside the lens to help me get sharp images with my wobbly old hands. The only problem is that the little gyroscope takes quite a bit of battery power. I've had to compensate by also ordering the BG-E3 battery grip, which allows use of 6 AA NiMH cells. It will make the whole thing a little heavier, but we'll see how well it handles.
You can see from the photos that I also got a Speedlite 580 EX flash unit for the camera, and two 2GByte memory cards. The memory cards allows me to take about 440 images in "camera raw" format. The Speedlite allows me to project light much futher than the built-in flash, using a separate set of 4 AA cells, so I don't wear down the camera battery. It also provides a short pre-flash, specifically to improve autofocusing in low-light conditions.
The smaller lens at the far right is the "kit lens" that comes standard with the Rebel XT and the new Rebel XTi. It's an EF-S 18-55mm F3.5/5.6 USM lens. The EF-S lenses can ony be used with certain popular EOS cameras, but they're very light and inexpensive. The fact that this only zoomed to 55mm was disappointing at the Pickle wedding. That was part of the reason I needed the somewhat greater zoom range of the larger lens.
Finally, I just received an EF 100mm F2.8 Macro USM lens. It's the taller one on the left of the upper photo. The gold band near the front of the two new lenses mean they're "upper range hobbyist". Professional lenses have a red band instead of the gold one and a MUCH heftier price tag. This is a "Macro" lens, meaning the optical arrangement is a little different than standard lenses. This type of lens can be used for very close-up photography, but the short depth-of-field makes for some very nice portrait shots, too. The photo of Paul and Jeannie in Kid Stuff was taken with this lens. The F2.8 makes this the "fastest" lens I have, but I'm still getting used to the fixed focal length (no zoom)
The middle photo shows the EF 28-135mm f3.5/5.6 IS USM lens mounted on the Rebel XT, with the other two lenses in the foreground. The bottom photo shows that adding the lens hood to the big guy make it look humongous.
It is a Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM lens, considered an "ultra-wide" angle... but not a fisheye. That means it's very wide angle, but doesn't appear that you're looking out of a bubble. This is a brand new product just out from Canon and Meg hasn't seen the cost yet!
You can see the red band around the lens in the upper right photo. That means that it's a professional quality lens... my first. In the middle right photo you can see that it's even bigger than the EF 28-135mm f3.5/5.6 IS USM, which I thought seemed humongous. It's also my only zoom lens to go down to f/2.8.
This afternoon I noticed that Meg had picked a couple of her lillies and put them in a vase in the family room. They looked like they were pleading to have their picture taken, so I grabbed the camera and attached the EF 100mm F2.8 Macro USM lens, then mounted everything on the tripod to take the photos below. I wanted to experiment with depth-of-field, so I put the camera in aperture priority (Av) mode. In this mode, I set the aperture and the camera adjusts the shutter speed to compensate. I also adjusted the ISO setting to 400, so I could get reasonable shutter speeds using just the natural light coming in the front window.
The photo on the left had a wide aperture, the full f2.8 of which the lens is capable. The camera picked a shutter speed about 1/20th second, so I probably could've gotten this holding it in my hand. The depth-of-field is very shallow, though. The rug, the table, the vase, and even the further edges of the petals are blurry.
In the photo on the right, I stopped the aperture all the way down to f22, and ended up with a shutter open time of about 5 seconds. Even the rug is almost in focus here. This would've been all blurry without the tripod, though. The middle photo used an aperture around f11 and gave me a shutter speed just about 1 second. This has a bit more blurry carpet, but I think it accentuates the colored design on the vase, and I like it the best.
