New Camera

First, big thanks to those that commented or wrote with a suggestion. It was a show of power for the weblogs, or at least the lazy web, you see, at the same time I was collecting suggestions for a new camera, my wife was busily scouring the internet for the best camera to buy. She searched for several hours a day for three days and, in the end, came up with only two choices: the Canon PowerShot A70 and the Nikon Coolpix, which were the same exact cameras I received suggestions for.

We settled on the Canon A70 and so far are very happy with it. It is a little small, much smaller than the Olympus Camedia, but Lynne informs me that it was one of the largest digital cameras she could find. Any smaller than this and it would be akward to take pictures with.

So what does any self-respecting geek do with a new digital camera? Why, go out and take pictures of flowers, of course. Here is a nice shot of one of the last of the miniature roses, from the bushes in the front of the house. Given the warm and wet spring we’ve has so far the roses came early and are mostly past by now with only a few stragglers just coming to bloom.

This is the plant enveloping the mailbox, right after a rain storm. Click on the photo for the hi-res (1.18MB, you’ve been warned) version. The Canon A70 has a Macro photography mode, which I’ll be fully exercising this summer. With no zooming you can take a picture as close as 2 inches (5 cm). It also has a slew of features allowing tweaking and fine tuning of all the shot parameters. It also has nice big green AUTO setting, where it selects all those parameters automatically for you.

The A70 also has the ability to capture movies, including sound, which get stored as AVI files. Good for capturing quick kid snippets to send off to the grandparents.