You have no idea how happy I am that I found this site! Quick intro: My name is Jes and I am a Disney Fanatic! I got my first "real" camera (Canon Rebel 2000) as a gift from my father and my husband several years ago. I had great fun with it at first but I had been diagnosed with MS and that plays lovely tricks with my eyes, blurred and double vision and all sorts of lovelyness. I guess that is mostly what made me give up trying to learn photography. Then this year I learned that my surprise anniversary gift was going to be a new camera. I will admit that I was a little disappointed at first, but I thought I should at least try to get excited. That is when I found this wonderful site!!! When my husband (and my father) gave me my new Canon digital Rebel xti I was soooooo happy! I am dedicating this summer to learning how to use my camera so that when we go to Disney in October I can take pictures worthy of showing to all of you!
Welcome Jes, The Xti is a great introductory level camera. Coming from the Rebel 2k it shouldn't be too much more of a learning curve for the general button locations, except for the new buttons on the back! There are plenty of great tutorials on the net, some are even here or on member pages. I would start with aperture training or maybe even EV training: http://www.chem.helsinki.fi/~toomas/photo/ev.html Everyone had to start in photography at one time - and don't be afraid to post your pics! We can all learn from each other and improve.
welcome to the community, i think you'll find digital to be a pleasurable learning curve, and the equipment of today can help you work around a lot of vision issues gary