New Camera for Christmas...Birthday...Valentine's...Easter...

I LOOVE my hubby!! He indulges me occasionally and this time he did BIG time! :)

There are so many talented photographers out there in blogger land and they have inspired me to try to improve my own photography skills. To that end, I have been wanting a new camera for awhile and Teresa at Eden Hills had recently posted about how much she liked her Nikon D3100 and how much she missed it while it was away being cleaned. I did some research and found that the Nikon D3100 is considered an excellent entry level D-SLR camera. We found the best pricing locally at Best Buy in Tucson and headed out a couple of weeks ago to check it out and possibly buy one. A purchase that big I wanted to make in person as opposed to over the internet...I like to touch and see! LOL!!

It was December 15th and the store was super busy but the salesman was very attentive and really took the time with us that we felt we needed to make an informed decision. He showed us several different cameras and told us about the pros and cons of each. Needless to say, I left with the Nikon, in Candy-Apple Red no less!!, and a 55-200 telephoto lens. Since we purchased the telephoto lens at the same time as the camera there was a substantial savings.

I have been having fun taking pictures with my new camera, I used it all last week with the candy making posts. I have been playing around with the telephoto lens too and took a couple of neat pictures of the mountains to the north last week during our bad weather. They reminded me of Scotland! :)

I'm loving the macro setting too, it's more "macro-y" than my little Canon PowerShot A590. I still need to read the user's guide completely and figure out exactly what all neat things this camera can do! I'm hoping to get some cool photos of the animals and the garden as the year progresses and with the amount of winter rain we have had so far, we should get a beautiful display of spring wildflowers!