New Camera! My Canon 600D!

*Just* in case you haven't noticed (a) the sudden explosion in the number of photographs I have been taking lately and (b) the sudden (albeit subjective) increase in quality thereof, the reason is fairly simple - a very welcome new toy (thanks to everyone who chipped in)...! ;)

It is a Canon EOS 600D with a nice Tamron AF18-200mm F/3.5-6.3 IF Macro lens (the lens that came with it *had* zoom (technically) but for all it did to the final picture it may as well not have done)...at the moment, every time I pick it up I seem to find another cool thing it does, but notable super cool things are the *huge* flip out screen (Sony handycam style), remote control (and remotely operated flash unit), *staggering* quality HD video recording, toddler-proof high speed focus and shooting (which works very nicely in very low light without flash), quickly movable auto-focus center priority, 500-odd shot battery life between charges, creative auto mode (that takes all the hassle out of arty selective blur), post shot on camera picture editing with cropping facility/tilt shift mode and various other filter/fish-eye emulators, 10x zoom-within-zoom for super accurate manual focus, three different autofocus modes (normal, normal with automatic face detection and super-fast)...

It used to be that I go out for a nice day out somewhere and come home with 150 shots to look through, now it's more like 600 shots (and I can begin my post-shoot processing in the car on the way home as the screen is so fantastic)! Amazingly all my "safe" shots with the flash I'm just able to throw away as low light shooting is so crisp and artifact-free, and in bright light not a *hint* on vignetting or purple fringing...One thing I *am* missing from my trusty Fuji S9600 (which literally fell into pieces in envy and stopped working the minute the Canon came through the front door) is super-macro mode (I can feel a dedicated Macro lens lurking somewhere in my not-so-distant future)... ;)

20,000 picture landmark - 102_FUJI

Not sure how many people manage to hit this particular milestone, but my camera (on Saturday) had to create it's *third* storage folder - 102_FUJI (I use continuous numbering rather than risk having any with the same name and accidentally overwriting anything), which basically means I've taken over 20,000 pictures since I bought it back in May last year! That's about 1111 per month, or roughly 37 pictures a day...in reality of course it's all in fits and starts, some days I don't even pick the camera up, and others it's never out of my hands...That is still a pretty crazy number though, even by my standards! ;)

Say cheese... ;)

Butterfly - Fuji S9600 super macro

Better click it to see the detail, pretty impressive lens on this thing, this shot was taken at a distance of just under half an inch (I must admit I was quite amazed it didn't fly off)... ;)