Topic: What's next?

Three months from now, I'll be going back home, going back to my country, Brazil, after almost two years living here in the US. Electronic stuff is much more expensive in my country than in here. That's why I'm starting to buy some electronic stuff. So far, I have bought my Canon 300D (not found for sale in Brazil !!!), a tripod and a head, as suggested here. I'm also deciding on buying a 35mm f/2 Canon lens just for the sake of close photos of people, like in a birthday party, due to its better optics quality and the f/2 stop.

So now I am thinking: what's next to buy? Is there something that I am going to need a lotin Brazil while taking pictures?

Let me make clear that I am an amateur, I have no intention to become a pro in any future moment, photography is a hobby, and as such I'll keep studying the subject as I like it a lot, specially nowadays when we can get rid of the dependency of third-party processing and scanning and have the pictures ready in our computer to correct whatever we may need or know how to, using PS, for instance.

What I mean is: to the eyes of a pro or of a more serious hobbyist, having _one_ digital entry-level SLR camera, two or three consumer level lenses and a tripod/head may look like a joke, or just the beginning, not nearly enough to what is necessary to starting thinking seriously about photography.

Well, to my eyes, that's almost good enough, due to the free time and money constraints I have. So, based on my readings, I believe that the one thing missing for me would be a circular polarizing filter, since I like taking pictures of landscapes.

Any thoughts?

Re: "So now I am thinking: what's next to buy?"

dare I say "insurance"

I'm heading back to Brazil. Insurance bought here would be of no use there.
All the stuff I buy, when taken to Brazil, loses warranties because they are USA/Canada valid only. These are risky buyings. I must trust the brand and be lucky.

Possibly a flash head? I find the pop-up flash on my 10D to be fairly useless, as I don't like the 'caught-in-the-headlights' look of direct flash. With a decent flash head, you can bounce the flash off a wall or ceiling and get much nicer results.

I agree on the external flash. It's so much nicer for indoor shots.

:::11oh1:::

I forgot to mention but we already have a Canon Speedlite 420EX, that we used for the Canon EOS 30 that we still have.

I'm having some problem trying to take good pictures with the Canon 300D and the speedlite but I guess it's my fault. Sometimes, I take a picture and it comes out too dark or too light, mostly too dark, and then I take again, all in automatic, same picture, and the exposure is okay. I dunno what's going on.

I've actually heard a few complaints about that issue with the Rebel, so it might be the camera.

From what I've read (and I haven't read a lot, since I don't go looking for Rebel info), some but not all users are finding underexposure a problem on some but not all flash shots. The underexposure is usually not so bad that it can't be fixed in Photoshop. I don't know many details, but I have heard of the issue.

Are the batteries fully charged? I've heard of some SLRs having exposure problems with partially-charged batteries in a shoe-flash.

Maybe it's the battery. The same problem was happening with the Canon EOS 30. I'll change the batteries in the flash and see if it fixes. On the other hand, it's a weird problem because if it were the batteries, the problem would happen always, but it doesn't.

The good thing about the digital camera is that we know right away if the flash exposure was not good. Despite that, I was already able to correct some bad taken with-external-flash photos with photoshop, but the final result, although good, is not as good as if the exposure was okay.

The thing I like most about this flash is the ability to bounce the light and avoid those horrible reflexions in the skin of the face of the subjects.

I haven't changed the batteries yet, but I found this site, actually a page, http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/hqm/300d.html , where the guy has some pretty good tips on how to use the flash. I followed his tips (use only the center AF point, look for a neutral color to focus on, lock the exposure, recompose and shoot) and it works pretty well. Consistency is back. Depending on where you aim the center AF point, it makes a huge difference, so that explains why the Rebel is so unstable when using flash. One drawback of using only one AF point is that the Rebel gets lost while focusing more frequently than when using all seven points. But anyway, when using the seven points, it won't get lost but it will probably select the wrong point to focus so it's better to have just one.

Changing subject, another extremely informative tutorial I found here: http://luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml . Interesting stuff.

Viol - Try studying here also: http://photonotes.org/articles/eos-flash/