Played around some more with my new camera. I wish I didn't have to work all day so I could go around and take pictures instead, ha ha. I would bring my camera to work, but I'm not allowed (that whole national security thing). Anyways, now that I've joined the digital club, I feel like I can do more stuff online. One thing I hated about taking pictures on film was you had to be sparing with the pictures you took and if you wanted your pictures as soon as you were done, you had to either make sure you had used all the film up at the end or just take the hit and get a partial roll developed. Then you had to wait for the pictures to be developed while fearing that the photo place might lose or ruin your pictures. Then you had to dig through that bin hoping no one else walked off with your pictures. Then finally, you get your pictures and you have to spend a ton of money for getting them developed especially if you got doubles. Every time I go on a trip, I end up spending about $80-$100 on developing pictures. And after all that, you have to scan them so you can put them online and show them to your friends. Also you are bummed because some of those "great" pictures you thought you had turned out really crappy. My film camera took terrible night photos. They always turned out so grainy. But the most heart breaking photo I ever took was of London Bridge. My camera case was partially covering the lens so when I got the picture, half of it was black, doh!!! Well, I will remedy that this time around since I'm taking a small excursion to London when I visit my family in France this Christmas. Oh, and film just isn't as sharp as digital nor is the color as good. After you have your pictures, you have to spend all that painstaking time to scan each one to share with others. Another plus for digital is storage. I'm not really the scrapbook type of guy and all my photos are sitting in a box. That box is full. Just think how many CDs of photos would fit in that box. I can add a caption to the digital photo, too. Yep, this digital camera will pay for itself very soon.

Anyways, being the engineer that I am, I've been trying to learn as much as I can about my camera by testing its limits. I've been taking pictures in the dark, in the light, different resolutions, different compressions, etc. One funny quirk about taking digital photos of people is you don't want high resolution with low compression. Nobody wants to see the veins in your eyeballs. You can make the most beautiful people look so ugly that way, ha ha.

My camera also makes movies. They are pretty good videos at 15 fps, but the limit is only 3 minutes per video. I don't think I'll make too many of these on my trip though. They are such memory hogs. But who knows, I'm with Nate Roth, sometimes you just got to have audio. Oh, but my camera can do audio annotations on the still pictures as well, yay! The other cool thing about the camera is I can upload sound effects for the different functions. So you can have the conventional shutter sound when you take a picture or how about a wolf howling or Strong Bad saying "oh holy crap!". The possibilities are endless.

Anyways, I'm thinking about getting some online storage so I can share the pictures I take. Maybe I'll pay Blogger the monthly so I can put pictures with my blogs. I'll have to think about it for a bit. One of my favorite sites for online photos is A Day in the Life. There are featured photographers every week from all over the world. I would volunteer, but there have been so many L.A. photographers featured already. The site is not being updated until the holidays are over, but check out the archive.