I got a DSLR
Fun fact: I went to art school for like 2 years back when I was 19-20, which is twenty fuckin years ago, man. Time flies. Anyway, I loved photography. I used to have a Minolta Maxxum 7000 with a couple nice lenses. It's probably still at my parent's house somewhere, but I have no idea. Lovely little SLR camera, that. Had a great aesthetic, too:
Shooting 35mm was expensive though, and has only gotten more expensive since it's kind of a niche thing to do. Plus, I'd have to go to my parents' house to get the frickin' thing, and I don't even know if it still works. So for my 40th birthday I ended up buying myself a DSLR. Well, two, kind of on accident. At first I got a Canon Rebel T2i off eBay, which is in a condition you might call "well-loved." It's missing half the grip panels, the screen has a huge crack in the protective plastic cover (it still works, though, thankfully), and the whole thing just feels exhausted. Takes decent enough pictures, but it's also just old. Can't complain about the price, though – it was listed for parts or repair and I snagged it for the princely sum of $43 with free shipping. It also came with Canon's extremely good 50mm f/1.8 "nifty fifty" EF mount lens, which is worth a good $100 (new, anyway) on its own. So that was hard to complain about. But I wanted something a little bit newer, and in a little bit nicer condition. So while I was on the Goodwill auction site, I ended up impulse bidding on a Rebel T6 body in much nicer shape, which I ended up winning for just about $100 shipped. I ended up having to replace the focusing screen for the viewfinder, but that was easy and the part was $20. On top of that, I bought Canon's kinda crap 70-300mm f/4-5.6 III telephoto lens and their 35-80mm f/4-5.6 III lens as well, for less than $50 with shipping. Then I was like "well shit, now I need a camera bag!" So I went on Amazon, and everything was really expensive. So I went back to the goodwill site and ended up finding a really nice and very large canvas and leather camera bag that included the standard EFS mount 18-55mm kit lens that should have come with either of my cameras (which is honestly a lot nicer than you'd expect), as well as a pretty incredible Quantaray 70-300mm f/4-5.6 lens with a macro setting that lets you zoom the fuck in to things for $13. Incredible stuff.
Then I got a Speedlite 550EX. Basically, I kind of lost my mind for a minute and ended up with a huge kit. I'm rambling though. Here's some pictures I've taken of the cats I've been living with. Hopefully I'll get out of the house as the weather gets better and take pictures of things that aren't just the cats I've been living with. They're great subjects though. I wanna say most of these were taken with the 50mm f/1.8 because it's just such a phenomenal lens, especially with the f-stop open all the way so you get the dramatic depth of field effects.
Aw shucks, I can't caption these separately if it's a gallery. Oh well. The orange one is Rui (he's autistic and loud), the black one is Tsukasa (he's needy and affectionate), the younger looking tortoiseshell is Makino (she's aloof and extremely attached to Angel, my friend) and the old one in the bottom images is Hattie, aka Hatshepsut, she's a total bitch who I have grown to love very much (and vice-versa, from what i can tell -- she's currently asleep under my leg) they're all wonderful cats, though!
I also was taking pictures of the squirrels that were foraging in our yard a lot last month, but they haven't been around nearly as much lately on account of it's been cold as balls. They'll probably be out again soon, so I'll get more squirrel pics. I named the fat one Jimmy.
A lot of these are not so great; I've learned how to use my camera a lot better since I took them and can't wait to get more squirrel pictures. I think MOST of these are Jimmy? It's so hard to tell. There's three and they all ended up getting fat.
Also, here's some bokeh from that fantastic 50mm f/1.8 lens:
Anyway, the whole reason I got the stinkin' thing was I got all these Libyan stamps from the 70s-80s that I wanted to take close-up pictures of, and I still haven't really done that! So, once I do, expect a little article about that here, as well as a ton of close-ups of some extremely cool stamps. Here's a preview from before I had any idea what I was doing:
Anyways, that's all for now!