Before (35mm f/1.8 1/60 ISO 800) — Gauss is testing out his new Christmas present, a new dog bed (there are dog silhouettes on it, and one of them is a Boxer silhouette, I couldn’t resist!)

After

We replaced them with 2.5 inch premium faux wood blinds from Home Depot (the Home Decorators brand). Installing blinds is sometimes a bit tricky, but not too difficult once you get the hang of it. So far I’m really enjoying the extra light in the daytime and the extra darkness at night. I’d like to add 2 arm chairs and a small table to this area in the future. I’d also like to add curtains, but I’m a little lost on how I would hang them around the windows.

Yep, this is the only photo I have. What do we have here? Beige walls, beige ceiling, and old lady shower curtain that looks like it could eat you on the toilet. Ok, let’s get on to the after:

Here’s the rundown on the changes:

Paint color is Laura Ashley’s Mountain Pass matched to Behr (Home Depot) interior paint in a flat finish (rebellious, I know, to paint a bathroom with a flat paint finish).

Shower curtain, towel rods, shower curtain tension rod, candle, soap pump, and wire basket thing-y are from HomeGoods. Yes, I like that store.

Towels, bath mats, ceramic bowl (actually an ice cream bowl that was on clearance), and waste basket are from Target.

The art over the loo is old-ish from IKEA and I just had it lying around and am too lazy to pick out real wall art.

I have to admit it was kind of scary to pick out a dark-ish paint color for a small, windowless room, but I think it turned out really well. I adore the shower curtain and it turned out fairly well for just kind of off the cuff design. Eventually we will do a more major overhaul to this bathroom since it will be a kid’s bathroom, eventually. Can I put eventually any more in that sentence? Eventually. In the meantime I will just go back and forth between these 2 photos and smile. I love it!

(here’s a few more photos from my new ultra wide angle lens)

So I’m already considering what to get next. Here’s what I’m thinking about:

Nikon SB-700 AF Speedlight — $329

An external flash would be great and I’ve heard people rave about how they are really useful, but I’m not so sure when I’d use it. I would be somewhat limited to where I use it in our house because the kitchen and living room have such high ceilings (nowhere to bounce the light?).

Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 ultra wide angle zoom — $699 (with a $40 instant rebate through the end of March)

This is a really great price for a fixed aperture zoom lens, and I fell in love with the ultra wide focal length when I rented the Nikon 10-24 during our trip to New York. It would be a lot of fun, but I’m wondering if I need to get something a little more serious/everyday first.

Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 ($610) or Tamrom 28-75 f/2.8 ($500)

I’m not super excited about either of these, but it would be nice to have a higher quality zoom lens in this focal length. Extra bonus could be selling my D40 with the kit lens.

And lastly, the Nikon 70-300 f/4.5-5.6 VR ($589)

This lens would be great for football games, ultimate tournaments, dog photos…I already have the Nikon 55-200mm which is ok, but it would be nice to have the extra 100mm of reach and better build quality.

So at least I have a while to decide what I want to do. Any suggestions?

Here is my setup:

The directions say to setup at a 45 degree angle. I think when I tested the kit lens I was at a slightly lower angle because I had to set it at 18mm for the lowest aperture. On to the results!

Here is the result of the D40.

And if you zoom in to the important part…

Looks pretty good, right? Maybe slightly front focusing, but good in my book for a pretty much outdated camera body. Now onto the results for the D7000.

It looks okay from far away, but let’s get a little closer…

Hmm. Not good. It looks like right around the back 6mm is the most in focus. Luckily my camera comes with a nifty little setting called AF (autofocus) fine tune. Unfortunately I had to set it to the max value to get a good focus. Here is the same focus test with the AF fine tune set to -20.

And the close up:

Here is the “before” again, for reference:

So, at least this saved me from sending my camera back to Nikon at least for now. I’ll keep an eye on it and see if it is any worse with other lenses.

My old camera is the Nikon D40 and was introduced in 2006. While that doesn’t seem like that long ago, DSLR technology has naturally gotten a whole lot better in the last 5-6 years. They even stopped selling the D40 in 2009 (actually it was right around the time that I purchased it so it was already on its way out). So what’s better or different about the D7000 that made me want it more than a new lens? Oh just a few things.

My D40 has 6 megapixels (your cell phone probably has more!). The D7000 has 16.2 megapixels. While megapixels don’t mean everything, it is nice to have for closer crops. This also means my files are a lot bigger so I picked up a 32GB SD card off Amazon this week. I almost got 2 since the D7000 has dual-SD card slots (how nice!).

My D40 does not have an auto-focus motor built in. The D7000 does. That means I have a lot more flexibility with lenses and don’t have to rely on only getting lenses with built in auto-focus. I had this problem when I wanted to rent a wide angle zoom for our trip to NYC and wanted to try out the Tokina 11-16mm ultra wide angle zoom, but it didn’t have a built in auto-focus motor. I rented the Nikon 10-24mm instead and it turned out fine, but a lot of reviewers think the Tokina is sharper.

Noise! This was a big one for me. The D40 is not so great at high ISO (when you crank up your ISO it is basically making the sensor more sensitive to light, but adds a lot of grainy-ness, or noise). The D40 at ISO 800 was about as much as I could handle. Noise reduction software wasn’t cutting it, and I refused to set it to ISO 1600. I haven’t played around with it too much yet, but the D7000 looks great at ISO 800 and pretty good even at ISO 2,000.

One of the last major considerations was the increase in focal points. My D40 has THREE measly focal points. The D7000 has 39. Maybe that’s overkill, but the focusing system is much more refined and will definitely be great once I figure out how to use it!

So, definitely many test shots are coming soon. First off I am going to do a focus test and post the results here on the blog. I *think* the D7000 may be back-focusing (it tends to), but I’ll have to run the official test and see how it goes. Coming soon!

January started off with a Snowpocalypse, shutting down Atlanta for several days.

David and I started our mortgage application and house hunting in late January.

On my birthday, we put in our 1st offer on the house we eventually ended up purchasing. Here’s me on my 27th birthday.

In April, we went out to a few Braves games and packed and prepared to move.

In May, we finally closed on our house!

June, July, and August were mainly a blur because I was playing ultimate almost every day. I did make a work trip and saw Seattle for the first time.

I also saw my brother in law get married.

We finally finished up the guest bathroom “remodel”.

September began the next project, the laundry room.

In October I rented a 10-24mm lens for our trip to NYC.

In November (well it was actually very late October) we brought our pup, Gauss, into our family.

And finally in December, I got around to posting photos of the finished laundry room.

I’m sure I’m missing a lot in there, but those are the highlights! We will see what 2012 will be like.