It's Camera Time!

My "new" camera arrived this week from B&H Photo in NYC. This place is like a crack store - there is so much tech it makes me giddy. I bought a Canon EOS Rebel T3i 600D body with the 18-55 IS kit lens and an add on macro lens that is f/2.8 60mm.

I say "new" as it is new to me and only the macro lens is new. I also bought a second battery, body lens cover, rear lens cover for the kit lens, tether for the lens cover on the macro lens, camera bag, a remote shutter release, and 64 G SDxC card for high speed access since I will be shooting not only JPEG but RAW. I had to buy some of these items because they did not come with the camera because it was used.

Saturday I spent most of the day setting up my Macintosh to work with the Canon RAW image files (CR2). I have Adobe CS3 on my Mac and have no plans to upgrade it to the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription service but the issue is that the CR2 raw plug in that works with Adobe Bridge or Lightroom does not work with what I have. Damn!

Thus I found the Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) converter which will convert from CR2 to Adobe Raw but I loose some of the metadata. Finding and sorting this out took at least an hour and trust me I am a master Googler; it was just hard to find on the Adobe site . There is Canon software and again, because this is a used camera, the DVD was not included so I next went off to find that software and the firmware update. Two hours later the firmware was updated as was the other software which included:

1. the utility program to update the firmware and will import images right off the camera;
2. the Photo Pro 4 software which is for working with the raw files - like Adobe Bridge/Lightroom;
3. the Image Stitcher software for making a panoramic image from many photos which I may uninstall;
4. the Video Encoder which I will need for future video tutorials;
5. the Picture Style Editor which is for those pro's who process images and have to do color corrections and and allows you to save the styles for reuse. This I may uninstall too;
6. and lastly The Image Browser EX which is kinda like the Photo Pro software but is geared toward those who shoot mostly JPG and it will edit movies. I will probably uninstall this too since I have Photoshop and iMovie

Sunday morning I was awake at 6:30 am, why? oh why!!, I went into the room where we not only have our weight training setup but a table for photography, and turn on the lights so they could warm up. I then picked a nice mineral specimen to use as my subject while I played with the f-stop, ISO, speed and other shooting modes on the camera. I now know how to change the ISO/f-stop/Speed and the white balance, color corrections and a few other things. I still don't know A LOT but that will happen with time.

Here they are with the settings I used, no other after processing touch up. The titles are as follows: the Camera Mode: ISO, f-stop, shutter speed. Yes, the mineral is Malachite with Druzy Quartz. The background is a pale gray.
Don't forget to click on an image to open it so you can see more detail.