Digging Through the Storage Unit
We've been trying to clear out an old storage unit for years now. After moving across the country several times and even to the UK and back, we've amassed quite a lot of junk! I'd like to take it all down to the dump and rid myself of this burden, but the truth is, there is a lot of good stuff mixed in with the useless garbage.
While going through some old boxes, I came across the first DSLR that I ever bought. It was a Canon Rebel XT, with the 4GB card still in the card slot. This was one of the most budget DSLR cameras you could get at the time, but I didn't know much about cameras so I was pretty happy to have it.
The battery was completely useless and wouldn't charge, so I found a cheap 3rd party one on Amazon which showed up the next day. I still have the super cheap nifty 50mm lens that I originally bought along with the camera way back, so I put them together and decided to take it down to the park with @little-ricky to see if it could still take decent photos.
This camera does not do video at all and has no live view which I've gotten really used to. You have to look in the viewfinder and shoot just like every camera that I ever used before this one. I was kind of a fun experience, actually. It just takes pictures, and you have to focus on that rather than anything else.
One thing that was kind of cool that I never knew back when I got it was the ability to shoot RAW. At the time, I didn't even know what that was, so it would not have mattered. I was just dipping my feet in and never touched the manual settings. I just stuck it in auto mode and shot away.
I was quite surprised to see how nice the pictures came out on this old camera with a max resolution of 8 megapixels. It has a cropped sensor making the 50mm lens work more like an 80mm lens, so you have to move a bit further back to get the same shot. I prefer using prime lenses, mostly for the size and simplicity.
Out of curiosity, I did a quick search on Ebay to see if anyone was selling this camera. There were loads of them for around 20-30 dollars! I guess with all the mobile devices these days no one wants to mess around with an old camera that doesn't even do video. But I would argue that even the most modern phones can't fully compete with these old cameras. The tiny lenses and proprietary compression algorithms that you can't turn off most of the time can have some pretty undesirable effects.
I would really recommend that anyone wanting to learn how to take photos buy one of these old DSLR cameras on the cheap and throw the thing into manual mode and learn about aperture, shutter speed and ISO. Because the basics haven't really changed over the years. Also, for that price you also get the ability to shoot in RAW so that you can bring your images into something like Adobe Camera RAW and mess around with the levels in a lossless way.
So believe it or not, this ancient, budget DSLR camera can still take perfectly good pictures. You're definitely not going to be making any large prints with these photos, but for social media and the web, it's just as good as anything else.
As per usual, after a long hard day of screaming, climbing and playing in the sand little Rick was ready to take a nap in the car. And I was as well.... Too bad I had to drive!
