I’m a short. round, opinionated old lady.

You can distinguish me from other short, round, opinionated old ladies because I’m the one dragging my camera and gear around in a polka-dotted Kate Spade bag.  When I am not roaming the Montezuma Wildlife Refuge or Sterling Nature Center or the marshes alongside Route 38, I am probably wishing I was.  I don’t know why plants and animals fascinate me so. . .but they do. 

Right now that polka-dotted Kate Spade bag protects my most prized possessions — a Canon 77d — plus an extra battery and a variety of SD cards.  This is the first camera I could afford to buy brand-new, everything else I own is  previously loved.  I can get some fairly decent photos from it combined with a Tamron 150-600mm telephoto zoom, but I am limited by an unhealed hand injury from manipulating that heavy lens the way I would like to, and I find that it’s best just to roll down the car window and balance it on the ledge while traversing Montezuma’s Wildlife Drive. 

Anhinga, taken in 2017 with the 1100d.

I’ve been shooting since November 2016, when my best friend in the entire world gifted me with a Canon 450d (in America, that’s an Sxi).  I loved that camera! It opened a brand-new world for me (more about that later).  I used it until it literally fell apart  😦  at which point I pestered the people at Rowe’s Photo to find me another just like it.  They did, but the successor was disappointing.  It was plagued by what I call “shutter shudder,” in that whenever you pressed the shutter button you could feel the entire innards wiggle and quake.  Still, I used that camera, too, until it met its final demise in July 2017, when a rogue cop slammed his brand-new Mustang head-on into my car, rolling it, my camera, and me head over heels into a ditch. 

Anyway, besides the 77d and that wonderfully long Tamron lens, I am blessed with the following:

• Canon 7D, the original model
• Canon 1100d, a real gift!  — only 9 focus points but I get amazingly sharp photos from it!
• Tamron 70-300mm
• Canon macro zoom 28-135mm
• Canon superwide, 10-18mm
• Gray cards (remember those????)
• A Bogen-Manfrotto tripod (that I paid $3 for at Goodwill) with a Vanguard ball head
• A Slik tripod with a Slik pan-and-tilt head
• Unique and treasured “bean bags” (actually 1-pound bags of rice) and a customized pool-doodle pad for the car window (more on that later, too)
• A Nikon Coolpix p900 (but only until my hand heals enough so that I can use the 7D and long Tamron lens)

So, what’s on your list?  What do you like best?  What are you hoping to get in the future?