New Camera
My wife and child headed out for a couple of days of "school's over and camp hasn't started" fun in the gold country. But before they did, they gave me my Father's Day present early, so I could amuse myself in my lonesomeness. I'm now the proud owner of an Olympus E-Volt 510.
I've been wanting a digital SLR for a long time. On my wife's desk is a candid portrait of our son that was taken about a year ago by a friend of ours. Without meaning to dismiss Bill's experience, his enviable eye for a picture, or the persistence it takes to get a good shot...this picture simply could not have been taken with a point-and-shoot camera, for purely technical reasons. Every time I see that picture, I miss the things that my 30-year-old film camera could do, even with my poor skills...like the depth-of-field technique (used to good advantage in my son's portrait) which allows you to frame your subject without having to worry obsessively about extraneous background objects:
So I'm happy to have that technique at my disposal again...and equally pleased that I was able to fetch the image simply by plugging a USB cable between the camera and my Solaris laptop. (My point-and-shoot requires me to pull the media out, and then insert it into a special-purpose card reader for which there is no Solaris driver. It's connected to a Macintosh that's nearly nine years old. Which reminds me, my data on that computer is overdue for a backup!)
My only real gripe at this point is that the camera didn't come with any storage media, but perhaps that's par for the course with SLRs. Oh, and I wish I'd been thinking ahead: the invisibleSHIELD for my LCD screen won't arrive for another few days.
Can't wait to take it outside and find some more interesting subjects...tomorrow.
Posted at 10:47PM Jun 13, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in Photography |