As if I don't have enough things to occupy my time...I am in the process of buying a new digital camera. I was never really interested in photograpy in the past, mainly because I couldn't afford to persue it in the way I like to, which is to say, to it's fullest. Years ago, a friend of mine bought a Nikon film camera and lenses. The thing cost him a small fortune, but it took nice pictures. Strike that, beautiful pictures. My problem with the whole film camera thing was initial cost, then ongoing expenses such as buying film and processing pictures. Digital cameras at first cost a fortune and took crappy pictures, so I never really got into the whole thing until recently.





My mother bought me a Kodak 10 megapixel point and shoot camera for Christmas last year, and I really enjoyed using it. After a pretty short learning curve, I was taking some pretty impressive pictures, considering the features of the camera. A good computer and Photoshop really help as well. The more I thought about it, years ago with film, you would have to have spent tens of thousands of dollars to persue photography as a hobby to the extent that anyone can enjoy now for under a thousand dollars or so, assuming you own a computer.





As I said above, I tend to take things to the extreme, so now of course, the trusty Kodak cannot do what I want it to do, which is manually adjust such things as aperature, shutter speed, exposure and white balance. The Kodak is also painfully slow to recover from taking a shot, up to 3 seconds depending on flash use and or battery discharge. I like to shoot landscapes, and slow re-cycle time between shots isn't too much of a burden, except that it really takes a lot of the spontainaity out of it. I also like to shoot animals and sports events, and slow recycle times for these types of shots are just unacceptable. Besides that, I hate to wait. For anything.



I was pondering some solutions to this dilemma, and the most obvious was to buy a new DSLR camera. Then I checked out the prices of the things, which are way out of my league and disposable income. This brought me to checking out compact DSLR cameras, and there are a LOT of them to choose from, all with lots of great features. The features I am looking for are ability to function in manual mode as said in the above paragraph, uses AA batteries, has a zoom lens, no less than 10X. I would like a camera that stores images in either TIFF or RAW format in addition to JPEG. Taking good quality pictures that are clear and well defined is a must, and a usuable, non confusing interface would be nice.

After a week or so of searching and reading reviews, I have settled on buying the Canon PowerShot S3. This camera distilles the features that are most important to me with a cost I can afford. To buy the camera, I have to sell off one of my guns, which pains me greatly, but I have lots of those, and no good camera to continue a hobby I really enjoy to the next level.

As I said, I wonder where I find time for all I enjoy doing. Some of these things can be combined, such as walking and photography, or listening to and playing music. Cooking and feeding myself are a natural pair. I can't help but wonder if I might be better at my hobbies, or enjoy them more if I just focused on a couple instead of spreading myself out so much.

I will post some old camera and new camera pictures when I have them ready.