Entering the 21st Century
Cressa and I have been regular shopaholics this weekend. I got some new golf shoes yesterday and Cressa bought not one but two pairs of Crocs (which encouraged me to get a pair as well), but our big purchase came today: with the wedding and honeymoon (St. Lucia!) coming up, we decided it was time to invest in a decent digital camera.
I’ve already got a nice (non-digital) SLR camera that came as a hand-me-down from my dad, but it’s too big to fit in a pocket which makes taking it anywhere bothersome, and for just snapping casual photos it’s really hard to make a case for going with traditional film over digital. Cressa has an older Kodak digital camera, but it’s really showing it’s age at this point.
With all that in mind, we spent about half an hour doing research, which I would say is an above-average amount of pre-purchase research for the two of us, so that we could make at least a moderately-informed choice. The Internet seems to love the FujiFilm FinePix F30 but being veritably ancient by digital camera lifetimes (at least a year old), no one stocks it anymore. The latest in the same line is the F40FD for which they upped the pixel count (to 8.3 megapixels), but for some reason got rid of the ability to manually set aperture or shutter speed priority (it turns out, though, that there are a number of presets that can give you pretty much the same behaviour for most common situations. If you really care about having that extra control in a point-and-shoot camera – I don’t – you’re out of luck).
Also, it comes in blue.
We went up to Henry’s in North Waterloo and, lacking any interest on the salesman’s part for selling us any different camera, bought one and a 2gb memory card to go with it. I also finally got a 1gb card to go in my phone and have since discovered that, through the modern wonder that is included memory-stick adapters, I can use it in the camera as well.
After we finished shopping we went for a walk along the Grand River and I took some pictures. It was just after noon, so the light was a little harsh and I haven’t figured out what all the buttons do yet but I think I got some decent results for a first attempt.