It’s been a year already since I purchased my beloved Canon EOS 1000D which despite being an entry level model, it never stopped to amaze me.
As I expected when purchasing back then, it’s hard indeed to carry around with you all the time, thus I kept my good old Fuji F30 compact camera. But it’s so awesome how easily you can take great shots with the 1000D (and any other SLR camera I guess), that I’m trying to have it with me whenever possible. At one point I even found my self carrying it around at the beach, or even on a roof top while raining, risking getting it wet, but the result was totally worth it!
For the past year, I’ve been on an endless shopping spree of accessories 🙂
- Canon 50mm f1.8 lens
- Sigma 18-200mm f3.5-6.3 lens (coming soon) *
- 0.21x Fisheye lens adapter
- UV filters (Kenko & Massa)
- Kenko Pro1 Circular Polarization filter
- Star effect filter
- +1, +2, +4 & +10 Macro filters
- Remote trigger
- Cokin P gradient color filters
- Neoprene camera bag
- Neoprene lens bag
- Cleaning kit
- 1.5m tripod
- Hand grip
- etc etc
The Canon 50mm F1.8 lens is one of the cheapest lenses available. It’s even solely made out of plastic, but I have to admit that its quality is superior compared to the stock 18-55mm lens kit. It’s a cheap step towards quality. I’d definitely recommend it to anybody seeking for quality photos without losing an arm and a leg in the process 🙂
As for the reasons behind choosing the Sigma 18-200mm lens, I just wanted an all around lens, with some additional zoom. Definitely I don’t have great quality expectations from this lens, but I consider this lens as a replacement of my 18-55mm lens.
*UPDATE: My 18-200mm Sigma lens eventually arrived right on time for my Xmas vacation. During that week it was extensively tested with impressive results! I expected nothing more quality-wise than my stock 18-55mm Canonlens, but I was so wrong… The photos’ quality (especially landscape ones) is great. This lens is definitely a keeper!
The most entertaining accessory I got until now, is the fisheye lens adapter. With this adapter on my 18-55mm lens, the view is so wide that I can see my lens’s barrel in the view finder/photos, up to ~30mm. But yet it’s so much fun to take weird cartoonish round photos of people 🙂
My choice of 0.21x was a bit extreme though, I could have settled for 0.3x or even 0.4x, but anyway.
Sometimes it’s great to take a single photo containing almost the whole 180 degrees view. Then you can get a useful image out of that, by eliminating the fisheye effect using the appropriate software (eg. GIMP).
Now that the newer Canon entry level SLR, EOS 500D is out, I might consider an upgrade. I never had problems in the past selling my older compact digital cameras in order to upgrade. But I think this task is going to be a lot harder for the bigger SLR cameras.
I was always interested into photography, and since purchasing the 1000D it definitely boosted my interest towards this hobby. I’d highly recommended it to any photography enthusiast who believes that he can take amazing shots with his compact digital camera, and thinks that SLR cameras are bulky overpriced devices 🙂
*UPDATE*: Don’t you love it when everything go as planned? As I hoped in the original post, my EOS 1000D was sold in the beginning of January 2010, so I purchased the 500D! 😀
So far it looks great, but further details will follow in future posts.