So, I'm not much of a gadget guy. I know it's strange with me being in the tech field and all, but I just really don't care about having the latest and greatest smartphone/laptop/e-reader/gadget of the month. When I upgraded my last phone almost 2 years ago, I had been out of contract for so long that Verizon offered me any Blackberry I wanted for free, any of their other smartphones for free or under $50, and up to a $150 discount for any other phone that didn't fall in those categories. You want to know what I got? A Boulder, so when I drop it (over and over again) it won't hurt it. That's all I need. It makes phone calls, and if I get lost it has a compass. ;)

All that to say, you'll rarely hear me talk about gadgets. But, last week I got a new DSLR camera and I'm pretty excited about it. I had been researching and studying cameras for months (since way before Christmas) and was actually planning on getting a Canon XS or XSI. I had been watching their prices for a while. Last week on a whim I just happened to check out the prices on some Nikons and saw where Adorama had a huge discount on this particular camera. I did some research on it, saw that it would actually be a better fit for me than a Canon XS, and I could get it for several hundred less than both the XS and the XSI. After discussing it with the wife (hey, at least I'm being honest), she convinced me to go ahead and get it for my Father's day present. (Sometimes these made up Hallmark holiday's aren't too bad!) ;)

The Nikon D3000 is labeled as an entry level DSLR, which is just what I need since I don't know squat about photography. I played around with it a good bit last weekend and so far I really like it. It slices, it dices, it chops, and it mops! Well, not really, but it can take some really cool pictures of people doing those things. It kind of reminds me of ColdFusion in that it makes hard things easy. It has a lot of preconfigured settings for shooting things like portraits or sports action shots, and you can just put it in "Auto" mode and use it like a regular point-and-shoot camera if you want to. But what I really like about it is the "guide mode". This allows you to go inside of the preconfigured settings and see how they are configured. By looking at this, you start to get an idea of what the best aperture, shutter speed, etc... settings are for action shots, or outdoor scenery, or portraits of the kids. Now, granted I still don't even know what most of the technical terms mean, but now I can read up on something and then go into the camera and see how applying it different ways will do different things for your shot. That's pretty cool!

So that's another item marked off of my goals for the year. I doubt I'll be posting many pictures here. I had actually considered putting up another blog to post my pics on, but in all honesty I know I would never update that blog either. :)