Dusting off a Canon Rebel T3
During the holiday break (more on that later), I spent an afternoon browsing through old Christmas photos. As I dug through the digital pile, three distinct eras emerged, marked by the quality of the shots.
Good shots with point-and-shoot cameras (either Olympus or Canon depending on the year)
Great shots with my first, and only, DSLR: a Canon Rebel T3.
Smartphone pics ranging from poor to middling quality. My current iPhone 11 takes darned nice pics, but not comparable to the ones snapped with the big sensor & big glass in my entry-level, ancient DSLR.
This inspired me to dust off my Rebel T3 and use it. After annoying my family with loads of shutter clicking around the house, today I took a short trip into Providence to wander around a bit and practice using the camera. I brought two prime lenses with me:
24mm/f2.8 pancake lens
50mm/f1.8 lens
Since they are being screwed onto a cropped sensor you have to multiply the focal length by 1.6x (I hear that’s the Canon-specific multiplier) to get the full-frame equivalent (38mm & 80mm respectively). I love the pancake lens and find it easer to compose the shot using its wider field of view. To get better with the 50mm will take me more practice and perhaps a little more thought before I press the shutter.
In my effort to learn more about this neglected camera, I re-read the manual over the holidays and was experimenting mostly just with the aperture and shutter speed. However, a couple days ago I was also adjusting the white balance on the camera because I noticed the AWB wasn’t always giving great results with my low-light indoor shots. Foolishly, I forgot to reset the white balance before I started on today’s journey. When I stopped for lunch with the family, I downloaded all the shots I’d taken onto my iPad (thank you, USB-C) and saw that I had goofed. All the shots had a severe blue hue, so the ones before lunch had to be adjusted. Lesson learned that I should check all my setting before shooting, and I figured out how to adjust the white balance in Apple Photos. Win, win.