What a Life!

This morning, I got up around the usual time (5:30) so I could have a few moments to myself for the sake of my sanity before the boys got up (usually between 7:00 and 7:30. But…it was not to be. Joey started fussying because he was hungry shortly before 6:00, and in the process, he woke Ben up as well. So much for that. Joey was whiney because he wasn’t exactly ready to be up yet, but my attempts to put him back to bed were in vain.

Steve left for work, and I put Joey down for his morning (albeit early) nap. Usually when he gets up early like this, he’ll take a longer morning nap – say, three hours instead of forty-five minutes to an hour and a half. Since I was looking forward to that long nap, his getting up early hadn’t put me in too bad of a mood.

I fed Ben while I showered, and then I headed downstairs to post a review of my new camera on my blog, now that I’ve had it for a week. Usually Ben follows me downstairs, or at least I can hear what he is doing upstairs.

I started typing away, happily writing about my new camera. I noticed that it was a bit quiet upstairs, so I hollered at Ben to come downstairs. No response. I called him again. Still no response. I did the counting thing. 5-4-3-2-1 Still no appearance from Ben. So I headed upstairs to investigate.

When I got upstairs, he was sitting nicely in Steve’s seat on the couch. Too nicely. I asked him what he had been doing.

“I take pictures of Joey.”

I turned and walked into their bedroom. Sure enough, the evidence was there. Joey’s crib had been rolled to the center of the room (gotta get the right pose, you know) and he was wide awake. So much for a long morning nap!

I decided I had two choices: I could empathize with the parents who put their kids in cages and are now in jail for it, or I could take a picture of Joey myself.

I grabbed the camera and stuck the lense between the bars of the crib. This is what I happened to catch:

Now, a little bit about my new camera. It’s a Canon S3 IS. It’s what I call a “faux SLR.” It’s not a true SLR, but it is more than a point-and-shoot. It looks like an SLR, and you can adjust the settings on it like an SLR. In fact, it feels very similar to the film Canon Rebel I once owned. It has all the point-and-shoot modes like portraits, landscape, sports action, etc., and it has the manual modes – aperature-priority, shutter-priority, all manual – that my Canon Rebel had as well. Here is an interesting article if you want to know more about these faux SLR types.

I recently organized the photos from my old camera into folders according to the month in which they were taken. I’ve been using Picasa as my photo editor, and when you download photos, it wants a new folder name to put them in, and when you go to look at them in MyPictures, they’re all out of order. Anyway, most monthly folders had about 80 pictures in them. This camera I have had for seven days. It numbers pictures consecutively beginning with 001, and I’m well into the 400 range. We’ll just say it’s very easy to take pictures with.

Now there are those who claim that film is better and digital simply cannot replace it. I, for one, think digital is great for my objectives. When I had my Canon Rebel which I loved dearly, I wanted to learn how to use the different manual modes and take some great pictures. But the cost of buying and processing the film held me back. With this camera, I can do the same things I wanted to do with my Canon Rebel, but it doesn’t cost me a dime (other than eating up memory on my hard drive, perhaps). I can see the pictures immediately after I take them and adjust any settings. That makes the learning curve much quicker because you don’t have to wait a week to see that your photos were underexposed, and you can see on the picture what your settings were and know what to change if you come back to it later.

The shutter lag on my old camera was what put me into the market for a new one. No matter how hard I tried to work with it, I seemed to always miss the great shots. This camera clicks happily away. In fact, it works so slick you hardly realize that you’re taking pictures. You can experiement with angles, composition, and all sorts of things (which makes the tally add up so quickly). Of the scene pictures (non-people), I probably delete a third of them on the camera and then sort through them some more once I download them. The people pictures I don’t delete (yet) unless someone’s eyes are closed or something.

One of my favorite tricks is the continuous mode. You know how some people always have their eyes closed or your kids smile right after you take the picture? Continuous mode is great for that. Just hold the shutter release button down until you get three or more shots. The first one probably won’t be worth much, but chances are one of the others will be pretty good. I’ve even managed to get some good shots of Steve, which seemed impossible with the old camera. And yes, it had continuous mode, but with the shutter lag, it wasn’t worth much.

Another thing I love about this camera is that you can adjust the intensity of the flash. I was sitting next to Steve on the loveseat in our basement and he was holding Joey I decided to take a picture of Joey. The first one was too dark (I didn’t have the flash on). The second one was over-exposed on Joey’s face since he was so close. I adjusted the flash intensity and got a couple great shots. Of course, Photoshop could correct any of those pictures, but why doctor them up later if you can take them right in the first place?

I must confess that I have outgrown Picasa’s editing capabilities with this camera. It was great before, but it simply doesn’t do the trick with this one. I’d love to have Photoshop Elements (I think Photoshop would be overkill for me at this point, just as a $1500 DSLR would be). With as many pictures as I’m taking, I’d really like to delve more into photo editing so I could save the great shots where the camera wasn’t quite set right yet.

Obviously I’m having a lot of fun with this camera. I need to go shopping for a toy camera for Ben since he seems to enjoy taking pictures too. I know he’d have fun playing with it. Always more things to buy and have…