I finally gave in to the reduced prices and increased performance of recent digital SLR cameras and picked up a Canon Digital Rebel XTi camera. I had used an SLR in the film days so I wasn't afraid of the additional complexities of the new camera. I was quite pleased that even moving to a heavier and bulkier dSLR, I'm still much smaller and lighter than I was with my old Minolta SLR camera. I've started with the kit lens which gets mediocre reviews, but it's nearly free with the camera. I wanted to use that as a starting point to see what I will want to move up to in terms of lenses.
I was a bit time crunched on Saturday and Sunday so I shot right round the corner at the Rose Garden and Los Gatos Creek trail. Monday I went to Hakone Gardens in Saratoga which I have been meaning to visit for awhile. All of the pics can be found here
http://www.sanjoseabrams.com/photos/RebelWeekendMay2007/index.php
From what I've read most serious amateur photographers shoot in the camera "raw" format. With prior cameras I always shot JPG. On day one of the new camera I shot both JPG and RAW since I was not familiar with the software to convert RAW to JPG and did not want to lose all of my work. Once I learned the RAW converter, I now shoot only in RAW. The biggest downside is that I'll need a lot more memory cards to have equivalent capacity; fortunately, memory cards are dirt cheap now. This puts a slight kink in my workflow of making albums, but it's still fairly straightforward.
