(no subject)

[inahandbasket]

I wish I took more photos.

Why don't I? A couple of reasons.
- Because my DSLR is fairly large and it's difficult to fit nicely into my daily-carry bag. It fits great if I pop the lens off, but then it takes me a minute or two to take a picture, which is anything but quick when trying to catch something neat that I noticed. It also takes a full 3 seconds from power on to first capture, so even if I leave the lens on the body (and carry my larger bag) I often miss that short-lived moment.
- It's fairly old (first-gen Digital Rebel), and the image quality isn't good when compared to just about anything newer. I can fake it to some extent in photoshop, but when the data ain't in the pixels there's only so much you can do.
- I don't like being "that guy" who always caries an SLR around his neck and frequently stops to shoot things. Sometimes I'm ok with it, but sometimes I'm not. If prosicated and I are just out for a walk I have no problem with it, but walking to the drug store by myself and randomly stopping to shoot photos always rubs me the wrong way. I don't know why.

Is this just a whine to rationalize getting a new camera body? Meh. Not really. I can rationalize that to myself well enough if I really want to. It's more me mulling options.

coraline just got a new Canon Rebel XSi body which is quite nice, and much smaller than my existing one, which would address a lot of my above issues. From the feature-set and physical-handling perspective my selection would be the Canon 40D, but that's a much larger camera body than my current one, exacerbating the portability issue.
So if I'm going to upgrade do I go with the 40D and a decent point-shoot for constant carrying, only whipping out the big-guns when I really need it? Or do I go with the newer and smaller Rebel body and get a sort of compromise arrangement?

All a moot point until after the house is bought obviously, but it's been on my back-burner for over a year now.