Escaped Thoughts

The winner of my camera run-off, after much reading, playing with cameras, and pondering, was the Olympus C-7000. What with the craziness of work, I haven't had too much time to play with it, but this morning a leaf on our patio/deck/porch caught my eye. All but one other leaf I could see were wet in a vague, glossy-sheen sort of way, but this one leaf was instead studded with individial water drops. Since one of the things that swayed me toward the Olympus was the 5x optical zoom and super-macro shooting mode (as close as 2cm), this leaf called out to me as a perfect zoom test subject.

And so, in celebration of my camera, I am opening a new “Photos” section with a few leaf pictures. The large versions have been scaled down significantly; the original files are over three times the size (in each direction). 7 mega-pixels is a lot of pixels!

First, the secondary droplet-covered leaf. Not so interesting as a picture as the one that caught my attention, but it gives the context for the detail veiw (which shows the full resolution of the camera).

I love the full view of the sky and trees overhead in the drop. The hardest part of taking this picture was making sure I didn't actually hit the leaf with my lens, I was so close.

Then a shot I like since it captures a bit of the feeling I got when I first glanced outside and the leaf jumped out at me. It's great fun to play with the photos afterwards, which is what I love most about digital photography. One press of a button gives me a sepia view, which I really like for the way it brings out the brightness of the water drops. Then I just had fun with the image for a few minutes, and created a version which is completely different from what was actually there, but says a lot about the way I saw the leaf.

The hardest part here was the angle; the LCD screen came in extremely handy as I don't think I could have gotten my head low enough to frame the shot the way I wanted if I'd needed to use the viewfinder, and as it was I still needed to crop slightly to get the frame right (another reason to love digital!).

Hopefully this section will grow as I have time to take my camera exploring.

Category: Photos

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Normally I have a hard time getting out of the shower in the mornings. I'm generally still partially asleep, and the hot water is relaxing and comfortable, so it just seems best to stay there.

Not so much when the shower is all cold because the hot water is mysteriously just air instead. Next time the hot water pressure is noticeably low when I go to bed at 1:30, I'm going to call someone at home and raise hell rather than just shrug and go to sleep.

Category: Random

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This was originally going to be a post linking to pictures I took of the new baby ducks in our apartment complex, but unfortunately those pictures will never see the light of day (or even the pale glow of the internet). For whatever reason, my SmartMedia card failed or was destroyed when I tried to get the pictures off, leaving me not only without duck pictures but in need of a new high-capacity SmartMedia card (as the 8 and 16 MB cards aren't quite as useful as the 64 MB that's now defunct). But the geek in me said, “Why buy new media for $20 when you could buy a new camera for $500 instead?”

Okay, so it's actually been building up for a while—I'm not that far gone. My Olympus D-460 has been a fine camera (and I'm not just saying that because Laura is reading), but as I've grown slightly in my photography I find myself hitting the limits of the D-460. Most glaringly, 1.3 Megapixels just isn't enough, as I learned when I tried to enlarge some of my favorite Hawaii pictures. But I'm also at the point where I'd like to play around with more manual controls sometimes, and I'd like more zoom as well.

Armed with that knowledge I struck out into the web, where I quickly learned that I am (or at least have aspirations of being) a “prosumer”—or a serious amateur in non-marketing-speak. The really tough part is deciding what form factor I want though. Everything I've read suggests that I really need a camera with either a fixed-zoom or interchangeable lens to get the full serious-amateur range. But that means a bulkier camera, and I've been spoiled by the easy-to-sling-around D-460.

In the end, I think I'm going to go with a high-end retractable-zoom-lens camera. Will it limit me? Probably. But ultimately I think I'm always going to want to have a small camera that I can use for point-and-shoot (but can at the same time rise to the challenge of an unexpected opportunity for a better shot), so even if I decide to really get serious down the road a camera like that will always have its niche for me. Besides, I'm not sure I'm quite ready to shell out the cash for a digital SLR (interchangeable lens) camera, and I suspect that a fixed-zoom camera would ultimately be unsatisfying if I grow, and unsatisfying at the more point-and-shoot end either way.

The current contenders, from my reading, are:

• Olympus C-7000
• Casio EXILIM EX-P700
• Sony Cyber-shot DSC-V3
• Canon PowerShot G6

The first two are smaller and lighter, which appeals to me, but it remains to be seen whether I actually care when I'm holding them in my hands. All have at least 4x optical zoom, which is better than the D-460, all are 7 MP, which will work just fine for all my uses, and all are somewhere around $500 dollars. I'm leaning toward the Olympus, partially because I was so pleased with the D-460 and partially for the extra zoom (although I'd take a slight hit on landscapes with the 38mm min (max?) at the other end), but I'll have to play with it to see if the reported auto-focus difficulties will hurt its point-and-shoot ability in normal use.

Next stop: the camera store, to see what I can see. Advice and personal experiences welcome.

Category: Geek

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