It’s been years since I’ve done any serious photography. I guess I got focused on having the Small Child and the ongoing drama of desperately trying to have another Small Child. Then my Dad got sick and then I went to work in Customer Service for the Devil aka Goliath (for the record now I no longer work there… Telstra).
All that coupled with the fact that I have decent wet film equipment but my digital camera while functional was certainly not up to scratch compared to the Canon EOS1 and Canon EOS3 I previously owned. So I kinda lost interest in photography. I have recently suffered a loss in the camera department and had to make one of dem t’ings….. you know an insurance claim. So I’ve been back looking at equipment to replace it and have decided on the new Canon EOS 50D. Should funds have been more freely available for such things, I think I would have waited a bit for the new Canon EOS 5D Mark II but at some AUS$4k it seems a bit excessive you know… just a tad. (My Canon EOS1 was around $8k back in ’96 but I didn’t have the whole picket fence thing going on back then).
I’ve only just bought it home today and haven’t really had much of a chance to play with it but one thing that I am immediately impressed with is the 17-85mm F4-5.6 IS USM lens. I was mucking around with it last night for a bit and am absolulty gobsmacked that I could hand hold a one second shot of a dog (what moves!) under a single standard tungsten lightbulb and get a result that was nothing to write home about but under those conditions was incredible! I’ve always been pretty steady, but usually only reliably to about 1/6th or 1/8th of a second (while coughing in a church :P). So to say I’m already impressed with the Image Stabilizing lens is an understatement.
More about the camera of fabulousness as I find something to take photos of š
.