Digital Camera: Initial Playing

I spent a lot of time recently researching a digital camera to buy. This post is really just my notes / narrative of what I did for future reference for me (or others). Trust me, you don't want to bother reading this!

I took a bunch of pictures in various conditions to try out my camera. First (Tuesday night) some outdoorsy pictures from the balcony (19th floor) in the google office. Then some indoors pictures with flash in my apartment (Wednesday morning). Two quick shots on the way to work. And some night shots on the way home Wednesday night (while smoothie hunting, if you recall). Some of these were of the massive postal office half a mile north of my apartment, which I used Canon's slick software to stitch together into a panorama. Those turned out pretty well; the software impressed me.

I'm generally pretty happy with all these pictures. Some of them had some parts which were out of focus and grainy, but the colors and sharpness were good. And the focus was just me trying to figure out how to convince the auto-focus mechanism to get the right thing in focus. Some night shots are little soft, which is to be expected from minor hand shaking during the longer exposures. The clouds in some outdoors pictures bothered me in some shots, but these were the same shots that other distant things were out of focus so I'm attributing that to the clouds being "out of focus" too.

All this and I haven't filled up the initial 32 meg card. Maybe I shouldn't have bought a larger card? But it could be handy. And everyone tells me to and they must know something. Like if I want to go on a longerish trip and not have to worry about downloading pictures or restricting my frequency of shot taking.

The only thing that bothers me a little about the camera is that you can't really use the viewfinder to frame the shot. It's not quite the same as what the LCD displays ( = the picture the camera actually takes). On longer distances they're pretty similar but on shorter ones it's not that close and the LCD is hard to see in direct sunlight.

Notes from later:
* Actually the battery usage also bothers me a little. With my current habits (which usually involve turning the camera on and off pretty often) the camera drains (cheap) alkalines in about seventy shots. Not too bad though and considering I have a tremendous pile of rechargables that I'll pick up when I go back to California, it shouldn't be a problem.
* Longer trips I can take a good number of pictures (seventy on most of a day of exploring) and I don't want to be forced to download them all immediately that night before exploring more, so I'm certainly happy I bought the larger card.