my new camera

Hello!

For the past month, I've either been busy or on vacation, so that is why there's been a lack of posts recently, but I hope to get back to regular posting now. Whenever I take a little break from blogging I really miss it and want to get back to it as soon as possible! It's just so much fun!

Anyways, during this break I celebrated my 14th birthday. It took me a really long time to decide what I wanted. Eventually, since I had started blogging that year and had wanted to improve upon my photography, I asked for a camera. I'm the type of person who likes to do a LOT of research about these things, so I read countless reviews and watched so many videos.

I ended up receiving... *drumroll* a Nikon D5200! *fanfare*

I am so, so thankful for it! Thank you mom and dad!

I was so excited to open the box that I felt like I was in a dream. Probably because for the couple of weeks prior to my birthday I would have dreams about the camera only to wake up disappointed, hehe!

There are so many things I love about it, it's just PERFECT, but I thought I should organize my thoughts so that this post wouldn't turn into one long run-on sentence. So I present to you my list:

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT IT

1// fast autofocus - with our previous camera, you'd have to sit there and wait for the autofocus motor to whir and whir until the image was clear. But with my new camera, when I press the shutter release button halfway down it autofocuses in an instant!

2// good ISO handling - with our Nikon Coolpix P80 (the old camera), even photos taken at very low ISO levels came out grainy. I couldn't use the burst shot mode, even outdoors on a sunny day, because the ISO level the camera chose to compensate for the fast shutter speed always made the photo look noisy! Now I don't have to worry as much about increasing the ISO on a dark day because I know the images will come out clear!

3// zooming + manually focusing - on our old camera, to manually focus, you had to use the up and down arrows, which was really frustrating. Plus, the screen wasn't very detailed so getting the subject in focus was pretty much a guessing game, haha! Zooming was also done with a button/lever type thing. I love that with my new camera, I can do both of these things by twisting the lens. It's so much easier!

4// flip-out screen - I've already used this feature WAY more than I thought I would. For example, on our vacation we walked past a street of really cool, colorful houses. I wanted to take a picture with the edges of the house parallel to the edges of the photo, but, the only way I could do that was by holding the camera above my head. The flip-out screen REALLY came in handy then because I could angle it towards the ground.

There are more things but I don't want this post to get too long, hehe! 

I'm so excited to start photographing posts, because as of writing this I haven't used it for that yet. During my vacation I came up with so many post ideas that I can't wait to write about. I've also been thinking about finding an alternative to the photo editing program I'm currently using, Paint.net. So here's my question for you guys:

What photo editing program do you use and would you recommend it?

I would really appreciate any responses in the comments below!

Thank you for reading!