new camera... woo hoo!

We've been in need of a new camera around here for a while now.  The plan was to wait until we got home for the summer since everything is much cheaper there than it is in Finland.  But... we caved and got one here.  Between some frustrating camera experiences lately (the Winter Classic, Stockholm trip... among others) and the fact that not getting it until we got home meant that we wouldn't have a good camera to use for our EuroTrip, we decided that it was worth the little bit extra that we'd spend on it here.  Plus we know it will be a great investment for the future, with all of the traveling we will be doing and for when we have children :)

We had a fairly good idea of what we wanted (a Nikon) and have several friends who have various cameras in the Nikon SLR series... so we price shopped around a couple places and bought one the same day.  The same place that had it on sale also had it with the dual-lens set, which is almost always cheaper than buying the 2nd lens separate.  The biggest challenge was asking questions about it- most sales people do speak English, some better than others... but aren't always ready and willing to explain the whole camera and it's features to us (understandable... I don't exactly have my Finnish camera terms down either!)  But, we got really lucky, and the guy we asked to help us was from the UK.  SCORE!  We picked his brain for a while and ended up taking home the Nikon D3100.  The manual, on the other hand... is in Finnish.  Thank goodness for the PDF file on the website (what would we do without technology these days... seriously?!)

After taking many pointless pictures around the apartment, of the dog, the half dead flowers on the table.... I decided to take it to the game Thursday night to give 'er a try and test my skills.  I can't tell you how much fun I had taking all of the pictures and editing them on the computer.  Looks like I may have found another new hobby!! :)

Here are some of the pictures I took.  I'm pretty proud of how my first sets came out considering I barely knew how to turn the thing on 5 days ago! ;)




Helsinki Cathedral




Senate Square in Helsinki




A row of colorful apartments on a street in Helsinki




View of the sun setting over the Baltic Sea
along the Helsinki coastline




Our precious pooch, Maddie




The hubs at work




Who knew I was a sports photographer?




Lots of cool action shots




#2 in your program, #1 in my heart <3