A Carefully Planned Splurge

It's already August, and time for another Gray Hair Update. But I'm hoping to get my scraggly tiger-striped hair cut within the next couple of days, so I'm going to hold off on the update photo.

But I do want to give a quick recap of No-Buy July.

It went....um... pretty well!

I managed not to buy any new clothes or books or other random impulse purchases. I didn't "Go to Target for Toothpaste" and come home with $122 worth of stuff. Not that that has ever happened before, I'm just sayin'. Hypothetically of course. I DID buy those $16 worth of magazines at the Borders liquidation sale. And Les and I still managed to spend tooooooo much money on groceries and beer/wine in July. But it felt pretty great to realize that I could talk myself out of most of my spending urges.

But before I pat myself on the back too hard, I did also make my single largest purchase of the year in July.

Blogfriends, meet my new Bff/Nemesis:

I've been jonesing for a DSLR camera for a few years now. I had a film SLR camera back in the day, and I had just barely started to get the hang of it right before film cameras became extinct, and camera batteries and film developing became prohibitively expensive. Especially for someone who was inclined to take 14 pictures of the same flower bud, hoping that ONE of them would be frameable.

But as you can probably tell from the lackluster photos on the blog, my digital point-and-shoots have been sort of crap. Portable, easy to use, and totally competent when taking photos in perfect outside outdoor light of completely immobile objects that do not have eyes or nerves or blink or breathe.

At the beginning of this summer, when I realized that I was going to have 5 paid wedding flower gigs between May and September, I talked with Les about using the income from that side gig to finally bite the bullet and buy My Dream Camera. He agreed, on the condition that whatever camera I chose had to be one capable of taking Pro-quality Poster-sized-Frameable Photos of Auggie. To which I replied, "Duh."

And so, I read reviews, talked to pro photographers, and stalked sales.  Two weeks ago, I saw a sale which posted the above pictured Nikon D5000 for almost $200 off the sticker price. It's a little MORE camera than I was planning on buying, but with the sale, it actually came in cheaper than the more basic version below it. And the D5000 has a built-in instructional guide right there in the handy viewfinderscreenthingy. Which has already been crazy helpful.

But I still almost returned it. It's intimidating. It's going to require a lot of work to get up to speed and be able to take the kinds of pictures I want to take. And, sadly, it's probably going to cost me at least $500 in extra lenses to be able to get a decent zoom or macro shot. Boo. I came thisclose to returning it and just buying a Super Fancy Point and Shoot. But as the last day of my 14-day return window came around, I finally started to get some photos that made me happy. Still kind of crunchy and imperfect, but I'm learning. And so SO much better than the tiny compact cam I have been using. So I kept it. The fact that I could not find the carefully-placed-so-I-wouldn't-lose-it receipt also factored into my decision to keep it, but I try not to dwell on that detail.

So hopefully the Blog photos will show marked improvement thanks to this investment. If they don't, please tell me so I can try to hock the thing on Craigslist before I lose my mind.