My first digital camera was the Olympus Stylus 600. The quality of pictures was less than desirable, so I eventually jumped up to the Casio Exlim EX-Z1000. Far better camera, but it was still missing something. Thats when I decided it was time to go SLR.

I eventually decided upon the Canon Digital Rebel XTi, partially because most of the photographers I knew had Canon equipment, and the XTi had better resolution and sensor than the XT.

These days, I now use a Canon EOS 5d, which has a Full-Frame (35mm) sensor, better low-light capture, more sensitive ISO adjustments, and other various improvements over the Digital Rebel. The Rebel was really nice for me to learn that I did actually like photography and SLRs.
I've been taking pictures for a few weeks now, and I'm getting the hang of it. At first I let the camera take care of everything for me, now I'm fiddling with the ISO speeds, f-stops and shutter speeds. Some interesting mistakes, but its coming together.

My Lenses:
* Canon EF-S 18-55mm F/3.5-5.6 Lens (Came with the Digital Rebel; mostly just sits in my closet)
* Canon EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III Zoom Lens (telephoto lens)
* Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Lens ('Plastic Fantastic', great lens for fixed length work.)
* Canon EF 28-135mm F3.5-5.6 IS USM Lens (an excellent all-day lens)
* Canon EF 15mm f/2.8 Lens [Fish Eye] (those crazy special effect shots of dog's noses)
* Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L USM Lens (Professional zoom lens)

I download the pictures via a CF-PCMCIA adapter, which I plug into my laptop. Then I use the ufraw plugin for Gimp to read the image and start editing and cropping. I have configured the camera to store the images in RAW format, which gives me the most flexibility in editing and colour correction. I extracted the ICC Color Profiles from the Canon software, and configured ufraw to utilize them. (Color profiles are technical and awkward to explain. Suffice to say, my pictures look bettter when the appropriate color profile is applied.)

Technical pointers

Lower ISO speeds give you finer grains, but require more light and are "slow". Higher ISO requires less light and are faster, but can look very grainy.

Smaller f-stop allows more light onto the capture device, but has a shorter depth-of-field. Larger f-stop requires less light, but has a longer depth-of-field.

Shutter speed. Slower allows more light into the sensor (potentially to counteract a large f-stop), but any motion can blur the image. Faster shutter speeds prevents motion, which can make images look static and lifeless.

I generally keep my camera in 'P', which means it automatically determines the shutter speed and f-stop. 'Tv' allows me to adjust the shutter speed (time variation), and 'Av' allows me to adjust the f-stop (aperature variation). For bright sunlight I use ISO 100; for cloudy (but still daylight) I use 200, inside is generally 400, and dark is 800. Best way to figure it is to take a quick picture, then look at the playback and histogram on the LCD screen.

The histogram is a simple way to see the technical information about your photograph. The left side is black, and the right is white. Anything clipped means the exposure is off.



My Gallery: http://phessler.deviantart.com/gallery/. Additionally, I took pictures at the 2007 Bay to Breakers race, which are avaliable here.
In December 2007, I gave a talk at OpenCON entitled Professional Quality Photography with OpenBSD.