Merry Christmas to Us

Zach and I cheated a bit and bought our Christmas present early, a Canon Rebel T3i.  We have been wanting  a DSLR for a while and with twins/probably our last children on the way, now makes more sense than ever.

The Black Friday ads in our paper spurred me to action because several stores had DSLR cameras on sale and I wanted to see if there were any deals that should be taken advantage of. So Thanksgiving (a quiet, just the four of us holiday this year) was largely spent doing research. My head was spinning by the end of the day but sometime on Friday we made our decision and placed an order.  And our beautiful camera arrived yesterday.

Aperture, shutter speed, ISO...these terms were a foreign language to me one week ago but I am slowly learning my way around this machine.  Let me emphasize slowly; I haven't even tried to figure out things like white balance and exposure compensation yet.  Usually I am kind of technophobic and let Zach figure out any new piece of technology that makes its way into our house, then ask for a tutorial on the basics, but I am pretty motivated to learn to use this camera.  For three and a half years I've felt like we are missing some adorable moments from our kids because our camera was just too slow to capture them.  Now there is hope.

So here are some early results of our experimentation.

I tried to take pictures of our Christmas trees with our old
camera and it just did not work.  Something about the lights, I think;
it was completely unable to get things in focus.  But this is pretty.

A little time with Daddy before he headed to work.

"Mom, what's he doing?"

For less than twenty-four hours practice with all these new bells and whistles, I am pretty happy.