I took advantage of the post-Christmas sales to get myself a little “birthday present” – a new DSLR camera. It just arrived today. It’s a Canon Rebel T5 EOS 1200D. It came with a 18-55mm wide-angle lens, a 75-300mm zoom lens, several filters, and a camera bag.

I’ll still use my pocket digital camera for most things, but I can do a lot of cool things with this new camera that the pocket camera can’t do. Like long exposures for shooting photos of stars, meteors, or lightning. The zoom lens will be useful for shooting wildlife photos, and will also give me more options for photographing my railroad. I used to do those kinds of shots with a Pentax 35mm film camera, but film and processing are getting scarce and then I have to scan the pics, so I really wanted to switch to digital.

Of course, it can shoot HD video as well as stills.

Nice! one of these days I am going to break down and buy a real camera, I just get to confused looking at them seeing as I know nothing about them!

Post a few pic’s when you can that you take with it, maybe seeing nice clear crisp photo’s will make me go get one!

Great new Ray!

A tripod will help with those long exposures!

Hmm better pics of your railroad … I didn’t think that was possible!

Watch out, world! Great acquisition, Ray. Can’t wait to see some of your new pix. BTW, I love my Canons.

Ray, The Little Green “P” setting is for “Professional” No matter if the book does say differently. Saves my As$ all the time for quick shoots.

If at all possible shoot in “RAW” format, at the highest meg setting you can live with. Also set up the “Color to Adobe RGB 98” as your base.

You can always throw out extra pixels then you need (smaller file size) but you can never really make more. RAW files contain millions of colors (16,384 shades per pixel) and JPG files contain only thousands ( 256 shades per pixel). ( Read - better, truer, color definition ). RAW files do require post shoot image adjustments. And they are larger in size. Buy large Gig size cards, don’t worry about the speed of the card, unless you will be shooting big HD movie files. Or if you will be shooting 30-40 burst frames at high frame rates. The camera buffer will take care of you, don’t waste the extra $ on high speed cards.

RAW files have about a 15 stop usable exposure range. JPG’s have only 2-3 stop range. Like comparing exposure latitude for 400ASA color neg, to 32ASA Kodachrome.

And Most Of All, SHOOT, SHOOT, SHOOT and have more fun then your suppose to!!

Thanks Dave, good info! So far I haven’t had time to do much more than a few test shots to confirm it’s working. Also read about half of the “basic” manual. Eventually I need to sort it all out enough that I can learn the few special settings I need (such as shooting long exposures for meteors or lightning), and figure out what I can ignore.