So ...
My brother's a closet camera nerd who's done lighting and sound in films / TV / low-budget Sundance-type documentaries and so forth for years. He also works with not-very-closeted people who rely on cameras for their living.
His Brotherly Advice on Cameras, after I bought an XSi during a Boxing Day sale, came down to, "Nice body, kit lens is awfully slow, can you get a Kikon lens adapter? had you waited six months you could've got "affordable" [I swear I heard the quotation marks] 1080p video."
My response boiled down to, "I know, I'll buy something when I figure out what I want to do with the camera, don't care, not for $600 with bag, 2 batteries, and kit lens."
And, after dissing the kit lens and lack of video, he spent a couple hours contentedly playing with the camera ... mostly at high ISO because he hates flashes.
Even my wife has scaled back her criticism of me for dropping some Christmas money on a "Freudian object that happens to take pictures" once she saw some of the low-light, flashless pictures I took.
I think it boils down to: DSLR cameras have come waaay down in price the last few years; DSLRs take good pictures with kit lenses; better lenses rely heavily on the user to take better pictures; there are reasons to prefer Canon over Nikon (and Nikon over Canon), but most folks who want to snap pics of their kids and pets will have their eyes gloss over while the reasons get patiently explained to them -- the arguments end up being rather esoteric.
My brother's a closet camera nerd who's done lighting and sound in films / TV / low-budget Sundance-type documentaries and so forth for years. He also works with not-very-closeted people who rely on cameras for their living.
His Brotherly Advice on Cameras, after I bought an XSi during a Boxing Day sale, came down to, "Nice body, kit lens is awfully slow, can you get a Kikon lens adapter? had you waited six months you could've got "affordable" [I swear I heard the quotation marks] 1080p video."
My response boiled down to, "I know, I'll buy something when I figure out what I want to do with the camera, don't care, not for $600 with bag, 2 batteries, and kit lens."
And, after dissing the kit lens and lack of video, he spent a couple hours contentedly playing with the camera ... mostly at high ISO because he hates flashes.
Even my wife has scaled back her criticism of me for dropping some Christmas money on a "Freudian object that happens to take pictures" once she saw some of the low-light, flashless pictures I took.
I think it boils down to: DSLR cameras have come waaay down in price the last few years; DSLRs take good pictures with kit lenses; better lenses rely heavily on the user to take better pictures; there are reasons to prefer Canon over Nikon (and Nikon over Canon), but most folks who want to snap pics of their kids and pets will have their eyes gloss over while the reasons get patiently explained to them -- the arguments end up being rather esoteric.
