New toy

This is hardly a post worth waiting for, but, a discerning eye might have noticed an increase in the quality of the crochet photos below. That's because I have a new toy! I finally splurged and bought myself a DSLR camera.

After hunting around I settled on the Nikon d3100. I'm a Nikon girl, because I believe they've always made superior cameras, and unless I was going to lose my grasp on reality and buy a Leica, built with the excellence and precision that only the Germans know how, that's what I want (if God is going to take our passport photo, it won't be on a Nikon or a Canon, it will be on a Leica, like this one - and that is a bargain!).

This review by cnet rated the Nikon d3100 as the best entry level DSLR, and while I don't really like to consider myself in the "entry" category to SLRs, since I have been using them from back in the days when they had a light metre inside the view finder and you had to adjust aperture and shutter-speed till the needle swung to the middle, it's been so long since I've had one now, and the world's since gone digital, that all those specs and what-have-you weren't meaning much to me, and how much I wanted to spend was "entry level". The Canon 550D is the nearest rival (because it's so much better than their entry level 1000D), but is also more than $200 more expensive, so where is the real competition?

I got a great deal from this website last week (I highly recommend them - they were fantastic, and I could track the parcel all the way here), with just the basic 18-55mm lens, where it's already gone up by more than a hundred dollars (and even then is still cheap), so I am feeling very chuffed! I have hardly had a chance to get it out of the box yet, and am still to read the manual, but so far so good ...

So, you can expect better things here (well, maybe). But now between learning guitar, doing crochet and perhaps attempting some photography (and reading books - that goes without saying), I feel like I have more than enough "hobbies" happening.