When it's NOT the camera!
Monday, August 30th 2010 @ 11:12 AM (not yet rated)
We all look around to see what other's use for cars, cameras, you name it. But much of the time for family snaps it's more important you HAVE a camera with you than what it is!
For our family trip to Oregon's State Fair on Sunday (yesterday as I write) I didn't want to lug along my hunkin' (but oh so capable!) Nikon D3 and a ton of glass ... so I took a five-year-old cheapo camera that we got for our then 7-year-old son. A Kodak EasyShare C300, 3.2 megapixels, with the tiny jpegs it produces and the tiny-er built-in flash.
And you can't do much with the images (it only shoots jpegs!) and the files are tiny so you can't go big with them ... around 680KB compared with the 14,800KB of a typical D3 "raw" format file. But still, it was great to have, carry, and use!
Outside or up close it was fine ... here we are arriving at the fair:
(Note: this old and "small" a digital has a low "dynamic" range, the width of tonal values light-to-dark it can capture ... so the clouds are "blown" white with no detail.)
And here, our Taiwanese cultural/language student Anita Tai (or more properly, Tai Ying-Chia) is standing in front of antique farming tractors she found amazing ...
And with the tiny flash, up REAL close indoor is fine ... here Lars points to his State CHAMPION 4-H biscuit (he's rather excited!):
But in a "dark" horse arena the low ISO capabilities and tiny flash output were a bit stretched. Still, it's better than no pic at all!
So ... it's better to have the camera to get those snaps than have nothing but memories in your mind! And if you can afford it, today's snap-shot cameras (like the little one Anita is using here) are SO advanced compared to the little one I used!
