Candace graciously loaned me her Digital Rebel for the day so I could get an idea what it's like to shoot with a digital SLR. She suggested I should at least try it before I plunk down all that lettuce for the Rebel XT. I'm glad I did - her Rebel was really a pleasure to use. It really makes my point & shoot look like a toy. I know I don't have any real ability with it after just one day, but there were a few things that really impressed me (as a novice) with this piece of equipment.

I played around with it at home for a little while early this morning. I figured that I should leave it on the automatic setting for a while. I've learned to appreciate automatic settings on a camera. See, I had a bad experience a few years back at E3 when I got my first digital camera. I didn't realize how much different the picture on the LCD could look from the same image blown up on a 19 inch monitor. And I knew that indoors with low light, like most of the convention centre, I'd need a higher ISO setting. So I fiddled with the manual settings a bit... What a whole lot of awful pictures. Some were salvageable. Many were so blurry I actually used the word 'blurry' in the filename. I'm going to try not to think about that anymore right now.

So this morning, I tried setting the Digital Rebel to auto but with the flash off. If you're not familiar with Canons, there's a dial on top and this is one of the positions on it. Pretty simple, but I noticed that any of the automatic modes would only take pictures as JPEG, not RAW. That's not a huge deal for me, I'll probably shoot some in RAW and others in JPEG. The only reason I have for shooting JPEG is to make processing faster. When I'm on a trip and I get a chance, I like to be able to upload pictures. My laptop can't crank through gigabytes of RAW photos too quickly, so I expect to take some JPEGs just for those quick uploads.

When I do want a picture that I can do a lot of post-processing on though, apparently I have to use one of the manual modes to do it. With the Digital Rebel there are a few manual modes and Candace showed me them for the umpteenth time this morning (but this time I was listening). I'm keeping a note of these things here so that I'll remember. You can let the camera choose the aperture size and set the shutter speed yourself (this is marked "Tv" on the dial on top), you can do the opposite: let the camera choose the shutter speed and you choose the aperture size (marked "Av" on the dial) or you can choose both yourself (marked "M"). There are a couple others but I don't know them yet. I played with each of those three options for at least a couple shots. I have to say this stuff is a whole lot easier to get when you can fiddle with the knobs yourself.

One of the things that drives me nuts when talking to photographers is that they'll use a few different words for what (as far as I can tell) are the same thing. Aperture size is the same thing as "f-stop". Speed can be shutter speed or film speed. ISO (which is actually an international body that publishes many standards on everything from programming languages to bolt and nut sizes) refers to film speed. Of course, when you realize that there is no film in the damn camera then you understand why the menus and buttons all say "ISO" instead of "film speed".

Then there's the numbers. I preferred adjusting the shutter speed and leaving the aperture size up to the camera (arbitrarily - I had to choose something). So the shutter speed goes from 1/4000 of a second all the way up to 30 seconds. Let me pause here and say this is really, really cool. It lets you take pictures like this one. The simple, consistent way to display this, in my 20th century mind, would be to show a decimal number representing the amount of time in seconds. Instead, I get something that says 4000 for 0.00025 seconds then shows things like 2"5 for 2.5 seconds all the way up to 30"0 for 30 seconds. I assume this is a holdover from the way professionals or optics people use these numbers in some calculations. Or how something's always been written in textbooks, magazines and so on. But it serves to make the learning curve just that much steeper in the world where everything's digital and accessible to the masses. It's one more thing to remember when you go to press that button. And it's one more way that a photographer unintentionally (I hope) makes the people they speak with feel a little more dumb.

So what I gathered today from Candace's patient lesson and some experimentation, is that there are three important settings when setting up a picture. The aperture size controls how wide the opening is to let light in. The shutter speed controls how long the light will be exposed to the CCD. The film speed (ISO) setting controls how the CCD reacts to the light.

Now a relation in three variables is a major pain-in-the-ass. So fix one of them. The higher the film speed is, the bigger the grain of film you're emulating. Use the lowest ISO that you can. The word "can" is here because sometimes you can't get enough light into the aperture in the time you can keep it open for. An example of this would be a fast-moving image. Like perhaps a kid skating. Like my kid skating. She's moving along quickly, so if I brace the camera on a ledge and try to set up a picture, I have to make sure that the lense will open and shut fast enough that she'll appear to be stationary in the picture. That means I want the shutter speed to be fast. In the arena, there's a lot less light than there is outdoors. So I have to set the aperture to open as wide as I can. The aperture will only open to a certain size for a given lense at a given shutter speed. So if I need a fast shutter speed and I can't get the lens to open wide enough that quickly at my lowest film speed (ISO) then I have to set the ISO higher. So I guess the higher film speed somehow means I can expose the picture more quickly. That probably refers (on a digital camera) to applying more amplification to the signal from the CCD.

The method I've been using is to first set the ISO down to 100. That gives me just the two other settings to deal with. If I set the camera to Av then it will choose an aperture size based on whatever else I'm doing. So now all I have to do is experiment with the shutter speed. Next I consider the subject and shot I'm trying to get. Today most of the shots I took were of my daughter skating, so I was always trying to get the fastest shot I could. Again the Digital Rebel made it easy. I just turned my shutter speed up until the numbers flashed (indicating this would be a very bad time to take a picture), then backed it off one notch. What I found was that I couldn't get a fast enough shutter speed in the arena at ISO 100. So I turned it up to ISO 400 and tried the same procedure. Then I could get a shutter speed of 1/80 seconds. That seemed to make a picture crisp enough that I could still make out her braid when she spun around.

The really fun part about shooting with this camera was that I could take at least four or five times pictures in a row just as fast as I could press the button. This is great for fast action like figure skating. The Rebel just keeps clicking away and buffers up a bunch of pictures, then it writes them all to the flash card after you stop shooting. There's a little number on the right hand side inside the viewfinder that tells how many more you can shoot in a burst before it has to stop. It's a huge difference from taking a picture then waiting a second or two like I have to with my point & shoot. The faster compact flash cards apparently make a difference with this part. I think it'd make a difference when going to review photos on the camera as well. I'm going to seriously consider faster flash cards, even if they do cost a little more.

The problem I had was with aiming quickly and accurately at the ice rink. I don't know if autofocus made this tougher. I have to work on either my aim or figure out a better way to do that part. The lense I used is the standard 18-55mm zoom lens that the Rebel (and I think the Rebel XT) comes with in the kit. I could fill the shot with my subject when she was about halfway across the ice rink (I stood in the penalty box to take pictures). I think this is a similar zoom range to my Sony DSC-P72 (which says it's 3x zoom), but I could be a little off.

Anyway, you might've guessed by the fact that I'm blogging this and it's about half-past two in the morning, or by the new photography category, that I'm pretty excited about getting a DSLR of my own. I can't wait to see what I can do with a Digital Rebel XT. Oh, and apparently it has to be black. Because apparently amateurs can be picked out by their silver camera bodies.

One final note: here's a comparison of the Canon Digital Rebel, the Digital Rebel XT and my point and shoot (the Sony DSC-P72) courtesey of Digital Photography Review.