Michele,

I honestly can't remember what light the little girls was shot in. But it looks like it might have been outside vs. the color corrected. The new one is a bit too saturated for my taste, too.

Yes, all of that was included in the $1600.00, plus I think I forgot to mention the USB transfer Flash Card Hub, so I don't have to go through the camera.

Honestly, I think I connected with a really nice sales guy, then something arrived wrong and the next guy would throw something in.

But it is worth checking out Butterfly Photo's web site, just know how to speak NYC really well should you need to call them.

:)

Hi Beth!

Just wanted to thank you for posting this. I knew I needed a new camera but was feeling overwhelmed with all the choices out there. Just got one of these last week and am very pleased with it! :D ... Though am still trying to figure out how all those custom settings work!

Thanks!

I just purchased my own Digital Rebel, which I have been coveting for eight months at least. My father, who has always been a photography buff, has owned one about that long, and kindly let me try his out for a sample portrait shoot a few months ago. My husband also singled it out as probably ideal for my purposes (and within our price range, which is possibly more important!)

My previous portrait shoots were carried out with a Canon A-1 passed on from my father. That's a great camera with a lot of capability, and I got four beautiful lenses along with it, but when you're shooting lively children, the lack of an autofocus is a BIG liability, IMO. I learned photography on a Konica SLR thirty years ago, so I'm pretty comfortable with them, but on a professional level, paying for processing and printing eight or ten rolls of film for every shoot was getting out of hand.

I'm a digital fiend anyway because of my computer graphics background. My previous digital camera, a 2.1 megapixel Olympus, has all the quick shooting features, but a fairly short lens that distorts portrait shots. I intensely dislike stopping to change rolls of film and missing good shots. And I need to get everything into the computer as an intermediate step anyway, No matter how my photos were shot, I usually work from one 8.5x11 color inkjet print, a couple of grayscales adjusted for detail in light areas and dark areas, and one three-value posterized printout. So my instinct was to upgrade to a decent digital with SLR features.

I have the standard lens that comes with the Digital Rebel. So far I've used it for a number of experiments and one shoot last Friday with a ten-year-old girl. She wanted to bring her kite to the park where we shot, and I have a number of pictures of her running around and rather small in the distance. There I was wishing for a telephoto zoom, or the ability to keep up with a ten-year-old!

But otherwise the 18-55 zoom is good for my purposes. Lovely crisp images, nice color. I obviously haven't figured out all the shooting modes, because I keep getting underexposed shots, but that's all right; I take them into Photoshop and brighten them up.

For accessories, I have two 512 meg Compact Flash cards and an extra battery. My old card reader won't deal with the newer Compact Flash cards, unfortunately. So I will have to find one that does, because downloading two hundred JPGs to my hard drive with the USB cable takes an hour and eats up all the charge in the battery!

Laura

Laura the longer lens is a certain must, for just as you stated... distortion.

I have struggled with the lack of auto focus too, (for those not familiar with this camera - the reason we can't do this is it needs the proper amount of light so the flash will go off if needed, and we can not over-ride this function)

I have done OK with the kids, what's helped is having a multi burst flash card. Check and see if yours says this, it lets the camera reload and shoot much faster.

Also, in my humble opinion... anyone shooting digital for reference should throw out their printers! Invest in a good monitor and put it on a model stand. You lose none of the good detail that you purchased your camera for in the first place, and you can blow it up really big to see little things like the corner of an eye!

I have had mine for awhile now and I still struggle!

I have a Nikon D70 and an Epson R800 printer. The prints I get from this combo are unbelievable. The Epson outputs images that are superior to any prints I've ever seen, including those from a pro photo lab. The color is virtually lifelike. I am very, very picky when it comes to my reference material. I have a zoom lens (70-300) which allows me to zoom in and get as much detail in critical areas as I desire.

I'm about to go get a Nikon D70 with the 70-300 mm lens. (Thanks for the suggestion on the lens, Marvin, I think it will be much more useful than the 18-70mm "kit lens").

I wouldn't get the Canon Digital Rebel for one reason alone: it doesn't have a true spot metering which I use all the time on my current 3.4 megapixel Minolta.

Michele my Canon has three different meter settings, which one is this and what does it do to make it different? I wonder if this could help me with my painting copies? Honestly I don't think anything would help that?

Nikon was out of my reach, but the Canon is great, you and Marvin must have incredible cameras.

Marvin that is BIG for you to speak so highly of prints from your camera, you are picky, picky, picky. Are you ever just using your monitor?

Spot-metering basically means that you can tell the camera to set the exposure based on a very small area in the center (or other region you specify) of the viewfinder. It can be as small as one percent of the total viewing area. This is great for situations where the face is lighted differently from everything around it (which happens most of the time, for me.)

For example, if my subject is in a dim room with a nice strong light on the face I want to set the camera to expose precisely for the face, and not let the camera average out the light on everything. That would produce an over-exposed (too bright) face.

Or, if my subject was outside with sky behind them, again I'd want to use spot metering so that the face would be correctly exposed. Otherwise the camera would average everything and darken it all down, since the sky is so bright. Then the face would come out too dark.

Instead of spot-metering the Canon Digital Rebel used something that I think they called "center weighted" exposure or something like that. It's my understanding that the camera would tend to adjust the exposure for what was centered in the viewfinder but would still try and average things out over the whole viewfinder, with a bit of exposure adjustment for what was in the center region of the viewfinder.

With true spot metering the camera completely disregards whatever is outside the "spot" and doesn't try to "average" what's around it when figuring out the exposure. So the face is always correctly exposed, if done properly.

Later, if I want to get a nice exposure of the sky or the dim background to see details in the shadows I can center my image on those areas and take another shot. Or I can turn spot metering off and get an average overall exposure. For all portrait sessions I take many shots with all different exposures. The most important shots for me though are the ones that are spot-metered with a perfect exposure for the face. The rest of the exposures are just used for supplemental information.

Michele, welcome to the digital world. With the Nikon you actually don't even need a meter. Once you take your picture, you can view a histogram of the image. This lets you know if any of the values have been clipped off, be they shadows or high lights. You can adjust your exposure by 1/3 of a stop increments in either direction. There is also a high light preview which graphically indicates which, if any, light areas have been blown out to white. This is about as idiot proof as you can get.

I would also suggest buying Nikon Capture software which allows you to edit Raw files and make very subtle adjustments without compromising the original data of the shot.

The kit lens will come in handy if you can't get sufficiently back from the subject (in the event of a full figure) or want to get a wider expanse of background. I would suggest both. They are both great lenses for the money. When I purchased my 70-300 lens, Nikon was running rebates, so it cost me $250. It's great for zooming in to get critical detail. The 80-200 Nikon lens is even sharper but is much much heavier and costs about $1600. The rebates may still be in effect.

The D70 is a full featured camera and not a stripped down version of a better model. I love mine.

Beth,

I think the color and detail of my prints is much much better and and the detail is clearer than what's on my monitor.

I also have a consideration that looking back and forth from a painting, which is reflective, to a monitor, which is back lit, can't be good for one's eyes. I think it's better to go from reflective to reflective.

Then again I'm a pretty traditional guy, for a radical!