1. Shooting Your First Digital Rebel XTi Picture

If you’re like me, the first time you laid your hands on your Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi, you couldn’t wait to use it. I would have taken some shots on the way home from the camera store if I’d remembered to bring a Compact Flash card along with me. It’s likely the battery didn’t have much juice in it, but I would have tried anyway. The XTi is quite tempting right out of the box, especially if you’ve previously used either of its predecessors, the original Digital Rebel or the Digital Rebel XT. All three cameras are similar enough that a veteran Digital Rebel owner can use, at least, the basic features of the Digital Rebel XTi with very little prompting.

However, it’s also possible that you’re upgrading to the Digital Rebel XTi from a point-and-shoot digital camera, a film SLR, or a digital SLR offered by a different manufacturer. In any of these cases, you’ll find the XTi to be a strange beast, with lots of dials and buttons and settings that might not make sense to you at first, but will surely become second-nature after you’ve had a chance to use the camera for a while.