Photog Newbie

[mjhoward]

Hello everyone. My name is Michael and I'm not just new to the site, I'm a complete newbie to "real" photography. I really had no interest in it other than for those random shots of the friends, house, or car no longer than a month ago. Around this time is when I made one of my first trips out west to Las Vegas. Seeing the Grand Canyon from the plane was really neat and there were so many other sights that I wanted to have great shots of... not just the crap ones that come out of the point and shoot. But stumbling across the Peter Lik gallery while I was there really opened my eyes up more to the artistic landscape photography and artistic photography in general. Thus the beginning of a new hobby for me...

The only camera I've had is a Canon SD630 POS point and shoot. The past couple of years I've had access to a couple of Canon DSLR's and really never did much with them other than point and shoot with the automatic mode. I never knew what any of the numbers or settings meant and at that point I didn't care. I've been reading up fairly heavily about photography and have been toying around with some of that same equipment. Mainly trying out different exposure settings and ISO's, a few HDR shots with AEB, etc.

I've also been researching DSLR's to pick up for myself. If I'm going to pick this hobby up, I'm going to do it right... As of right now, I believe I'll probably pick up the Canon 5D MKII kit with the 24-105mm L lens. This choice for me has boiled down to 2 things. I've decided to go with Canon because of my familiarity with them and the fact that I can use Nikon lenses on them if I ever wanted, and I've decided on the 5DMKII because it has a full frame sensor and I think that will give me a little more flexibility for its uses if I'm only going to have one body in addition to the other benefits of a FF sensor. Plus, that kit has a pretty good lens at almost half the price of if the lens was bought separately. So... any thoughts? lol Oh and does anyone know if it might be worth waiting to see if there are any kind of Black Friday sales on this kit or do they not ever discount this setup. I'm still occupied with a project in the backyard for now, so I'm not in a big hurry to get set up just yet.