The New Camera

So, last week my new camera came. Having a decent 7.1 mega pixel Shirt Pocket Form Factor Casio camera with a 3x optical zoom I was not really in the market for one. But woot had this one on sale for $99 last week:

It is factory refurbished. I never buy refurbished unless it is factory certified by the original manufacturer and comes with the full years warranty, not that 90 day deal you get from some places. It looks brand new and features 12 mega pixels and a 5x optical zoom while still fitting in a shirt sleeve pocket. Read an independent review of it here. A good deal, since the lowest price I could find the same factory refurbish elsewhere was $179.

I LOVE THIS CAMERA! It also takes HD video at 1280x720 resolution and unlike most digital still picture cameras that do video, it will auto focus and let you use the zoom while filming. The shots I have taken have been gorgeous, and it also has a built in panorama mode where you take three pictures, such as of a nice scenic landscape or cityscape, and it stitches them into one wide picture. See an example below and remember it has been scaled down somewhat so as not to use too much picture quota on the blog. The original shot is just over 30 megabytes and has dimensions of 6124x1648. Click the picture for a larger version.

doo doo doo, looking out my back door!

Danielle is happy because the previous camera has been delegated for the kids to use and she has been following Tails around taking many pictures!

Speaking of Tails, here is a shot of her taken with the new camera; look how cute and fuzzy she is!!! Click the picture for a larger version. Awwwww!

Take a picture, It'll last longer.....

Yea, it'll last longer, maybe too long in fact!!

After getting my iPod Touch I decided I was going to put all my digital pictures on it. This took a weekend and much CPU time, plus I had to start over as the drive the images are on ran out of space as iTunes was converting them.

After getting them on the iPod and viewing some of them I was reminded of an issue that has been growing since 1999. This is when I got my first Digital camera, a Kodak DC210 courtesy of my friend David, and began taking pictures.

This issue is simply that I have too many pictures! Those of you with digital cameras know how it is; since there is no film to deal with or associated developing costs, you just tend to take many more pictures than you would with a film-based camera.

So, the weekend before last I began the laborious task of going through over 12,000 images. There were instances where, to get a good shot, I had taken multiples, anywhere from 1 or two, to 15 at the burst rate of whatever camera I had. Do I really need more than one image or a given shot? In almost every case, the answer was "No!", but, going through the multiple images and choosing the one to keep is very time consuming.

There were also a lot of blurred images so there were deleted. Poorly kit or bad contrast images? Ones that could not be tweaked, candidates for deletion, and this too was a time consuming process. How about pictures with no family members, but kids that even my kids do not remember? Gone!

Series of shots of kids soccer games? Greatly reduced by eliminating pictures where my kids were occluded behind another player, or by using the rules above for multiple shots of a given scene.

Then there were a number of shots in the "What the heck was I thinking category!" when I took them!

All this takes time, and this last weekend, other than caring for the kids and spending some time with them when they were not playing, I did nothing but work on whittling this down.

It was also quite sad in some cases as I went through several years of pictures when the X and I were married. I have been quite blue with this all week in fact. On the plus side, I have seen many pictures of the kids growing and cavorting around that I had forgotten! I've also got the idea to make some themed slide shows from recurring subject matter over the years.

I hope to be completed with this painful task this week, and I will post a recap of number of pictures and storage requirements before and after the great purge of 2007!

Going forward I will be doing this cleaning process as I offload the memory card, and I wonder why I just did not do this from the get-go!