.....Life with the Jensens.....: New Camera :)

Good morning :) My goal for this morning was to wake up at 6:30am in order to go to Blue Ridge's 8:30 (first) service. That didn't happen... lol. I hit snooze like 6 times before I finally turned the stupid thing off. We'll go to the 10:30 service instead. In the mean time, I'm going to blog and attempt to make homemade granola pancakes with homemade blueberry syrup for breakfast. Yay for recipe testing. If they turn out to be gross, we can just eat cereal.

For the longest time, I have wanted to get a DSLR camera. I love photography, but my Cybershot camera is the pits. DSLR cameras take pictures much clearer and faster than regular digital cameras. They can capture cooler shots with more depth and/or more focus. They allow for more user control. But they're really expensive (from about $500 for lower end cameras to well into the $1,000 range for nicer ones), so I put that idea out of my head.

I was looking on Best Buy's website one day, which shocked Aaron (LOL), so he asked what I was looking at. Well, Aaron had apparently also been researching different DSLR cameras without my knowledge. So he started asking me what qualities I wanted out of it, what types of pictures I wanted to get, etc. We were at the mall and Aaron said he wanted to go to Ritz Camera. He asked dozens of questions about one particular camera (which was $700) and I knew we couldn't afford right now. I knew he wasn't going to get it for me, at least not until he has a new job. Then one day last week, he told me he had ordered me one for our anniversary (YAY!) since we're not going anywhere this year. (In the past we've done the Hotel Roanoke, bought a house and stayed at the Winngate while our re-surfaced bathtub was drying lol, and last year we went to Disney World and Myrtle Beach). He told me it would arrive from UPS within the next few days, but that I wasn't allowed to open it till our anniversary (March 10th).

Well, I came home from work on Thursday and Aaron was smiling so sweetly and told me to go look on our bed. There was a sweet anniversary card, a memory card, and a Nikon D3100 camera laying on our bed! He *never* waits to give me my presents lol. But that's one of the things I love about him. He gets so excited to make me happy.

Apparently he got this $700 camera for $450 from Amazon (new). And I love it! Now I have a much nicer camera to take pictures of us, our pets, nature, and the houses I'll soon be staging and designing. And it takes super-clear HD videos. There is a setting to make it continually take pictures as long as your finger is on the button, so I got carried away and took like 70 pictures in
a 5 minute span haha. I'm also going to do a (very amateur) photo shoot of my brother and his girlfriend soon. My favorite pictures so far are of Opal playing with the laser pen dot: