My new camera and other stuff

After reading many reviews I decided that I should put some birthday money to good use and buy myself a lovely new digital SLR camera.

This is a Canon EOS 350D which is the model I went for. It was the entry level SLR from Canon when I got it (it has now been superseded by the Canon EOS 400D). To confuse things in America this model is knows as a Rebel XT. Basically it is a really good entry level SLR camera and has great image quality and good features from a leading manufacturer. The other option I considered was the Nikon D40. I bought it for about £480 which was a bargain in 2006. Loads more options now though.

The camera came with a 18-55mm kit lens which is basically a standard cheap lens they bundle with the camera to get you started. It is ok but you can definately see the difference in build quality if you compare it to a higher spec. lens. Anyway - it was fine as a starter lens and I didn't want to get too hung up on the technology. Sayingy that - I did buy a second Tamron 70-300mm 4-5.6 lens too.

I also got a skylight filter for each lens. The ideas of this is that it is a cheap filter which does very little to the picture but protects the lens. So - rather than your expensive lens getting damaged or scratched, your £15 filter does instead. People use a UV filter for the same reason. I have since read that a skylight filter 'warms' the image up a little but I haven't really noticed it. I'll check at some point.

I also got a couple of memory cards to save pictures on. I got two 1 GB cards rather than one 2GB card. The reasoning behind this is that if you have two or more smaller cards then your eggs are not all in one basket (if all your pictures are on one card and it fails, you lose it or drop it in your pint you are properly stuffed).

I got a spare battery so I can always have a fully charged spare and swap when the first runs out of juice. Also an infra-red remote control so I can release the shutter without touching the camera (for long exposures).

The final bit of kit was a Tamrac Adventure 7 backpack to put all the other stuff in.
So this was my final shopping list:

• Canon EOS 350D SLR camera
• Canon EFS 18-55mm kit lens (came with camera)
• Tamron AF 70-300mm 4-5.6 lens
• Jessops 58mm Skylight 1A filter (to protect the Canon lens)
• Optex 62mm Skylight 1A filer (to protect the Tamron lens)
• Canon RC-1 remote control
• 2 x 1GB PNY 80x compact flash memory cards
• Spare battery for camer (Canon NB-2LH I think)
• Tamrac Adventure 7 camera backpack

And here is a picture of it some of it .....