I bought my Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera last year with a lens kit of Canon 18-55mm IS. Canon EOS 40D is a great camera with various feature aiming for a serious hobbyist photographer, even though I am not that level yet I am trying hard to become one and maybe in the future might actually become a professional photographer.

When I got the camera, my first impression was that Canon EOS 40D is a rather bulky camera. Luckily my hand is big enough that the camera fits comfortably in my palm. The camera came with a kit lens Canon 18-55mm IS, a very light and wobbly lens but I think it suits perfectly with the camera and with me while I learn how to use my 40D.

I used to own SLR camera before but I but it was my brother's in which when he lost interest with it I took it from him. It was a Minolta X700 and I was very happy with it until it broke and cost of repair was the same as buying a new camera. But during that time I was very busy with work, so I simply forgotten about photography until my wife bought a Canon film, point and shoot camera. But then it is also the same time as the pixel world exploded where camera was getting cheaper and pixel kept getting higher, the need to own a digital camera made us bought a digital point and shoot camera, a Nikon Coolpix P1. It is a good point and shoot with a WiFi feature that can transfer photos without wire to any personal computers with WiFi built-in devices which most of the latest laptop is already equipped with.

Somehow or rather the interest came back and I started to learn back how to take photos and I suppose it is just like riding a bike, you can't really forget how, and not for long that I started feeling the limitation of point and shoot (PnS) so I started looking for a better camera. So after a few months of surveying, lurking from one photo forum to the other, reading reviews from one site to the other I finally get a hold of my first DSLR, a Canon EOS 40D. Now, the new camera already changes my life, and I hope for a long and beautiful friendship ahead..

About 2-3 months or so after that I bought a new lens Tamron Zoom Telephoto AF 70-300mm f4-5.6 Di LD Macro to get a feel of using a tele-zoom for some reach. It is a cheap lens in comparison to other lens just a couple hundred dollars. But my justification of buying this is that I want to get to know how to handle this range of reach using el'chepo first before committing to a more expensive one. A camera like Canon EOS 40D is a cropped camera which is 1.6 times. This means that if I got a lens of 70-300, the actual zoom reach would be times 1.6 that is 112-480mm so having 70-300mm lens is not bad at all using a cropped camera. So taking photos of birds are possible.

Most the photos found in this blog would be taken using the Canon EOS 40D and the Nikon Coolpix P1.