Pictures and a Fancy Camera

I was reading a friend's blog and they mentioned wanting a fancy camera.  After years of waiting, I finally got a nice digital SLR camera last year.  A Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS.  I have a standard lens as well as a 70-300 mm zoom.  I actually bought it at Sam's Club for about $700 for the whole package.  It's a 10 mega-pixel camera.  They have a 15 mega-pixel camera out now.  Most of the pictures I take are about 5 mega-pixels (3888 x 2800 pixels).  I have blown up prints to 20 x 24 inches and they're still very clear.  I can take larger (raw) images, but they take up so much space and I don't really need anything that large, and it takes a special program to open/edit the raw images.  I have a 16 GB card in the camera, and have had over 1600 pictures on the card without it coming close to being full.  I will drain the battery in the camera before filling up the card.  In DC I took about 600 pictures in one day (many with the flash) and that's when the battery died  The one thing that I love about the size and quality of the pictures is the fact that I can crop my pictures down to pull out the details that I like.  I don't like to take pictures that have been "taken before."  I have a tendency to look at things a little differently, and like my pictures to reflect that.  I rarely have any need to edit the pictures for exposure and whatnot; I will take the color out of pictures from time to time just because I like black and white.  This year I've been trying to learn how to take good pictures using the manual settings; and I've taken a lot of really bad pictures because of it, but I'm getting better.  The full-auto setting is easy to use, but I didn't wait all these years to just get another point and shoot digital camera.  I'm glad I got it.