Breaking her in...

After a few weeks of reading on the best forum on the internet (literally hundreds of thousands of years of collective photography knowledge), I took my camera out to the first place that many newbie camera owners do...the zoo. I had also just recently purchased a 70-200/f4.0L IS, and wanted to take that for a spin...and good GOD was that lens sharp. I've since returned that lens and moved to the faster 2.8L IS for low light and sports photography, though.

I just re-read the first paragraph of this blog, and I realized this is all shop talk...sorry!

BUT anyway, I took my new 30D and lens to the zoo, and along with my brother who had just gotten his XTi, we just shot like mad, learning the settings, how to manipulate them, and seeing how the same picture could turn out a hundred different ways with different combinations of settings. I was hooked... :)

There's this interesting phenomenon that occurs whenever a newbie photographer (or even the most seasoned pro) purchases a new camera...the first picture to be presented is almost always waterfowl of some kind, typically a duck or goose. I hate geese. They poop too much, they poop EVERYWHERE, and they're ornery. Ducks? Much cuter. Much nicer. So what did I shoot? A duck. "Go shoot a duck," as they would say.



One of the first pictures I had ever taken with a digital SLR. And what a wonderful feeling that was...the snap/click/buzz of the shutter curtains opening and closing, and the immediate feedback on the back LCD of the capture. So we ran around the zoo with the camera around my neck, snapping pictures of anything and everything we could find (how Asian are we?).






This picture was actually a mistake, but turned out to be interesting to me, so I decided to keep it. It's of a mother and baby elephant, but when I first glanced at it, it looked like a man kneeling down on his knees with his hands on the ground. Weird...



Lucky for me, the butterfly exhibit was in full swing, and I was able to get a shot of a newly emerged butterfly.





This guy was being shy...






I had such a great time that my then-fiancee and I went back again to take more pictures and look at the animals. :)