New camera
Happy May Day, everyone. I don’t even know what that means. I think it has something to do with a bunch of white-robed virgins dancing around a giant phallic symbol, and it seems hard to go wrong with that.
Anyhow, this weekend I decided to celebrate my slightly better-paying position with the same company by acquiring some new credit card debt. Saturday I went to Best Buy and bought a camera. I enjoy photography as a hobby, and I finally got over my urge to go with film and fill up my bathtub with nasty chemicals. I may still do that somewhere down the road, but for now I bought a Canon A520 digital camera. It’s one of the of the Canon models that doesn’t come in a blister pack and that doesn’t cost four digits. It seems like a nice option for where I’m at, which is that I don’t want to spend a whole lot, but I’d still like a tool that lets me pretend that I kind of know what I’m doing. It has all kinds of overrides for shutter speeds and focusing and things like that, and, if I decide to spend entirely too much on fancy lenses, it lets me use those, too. Today’s weather was beautiful, so I spent it walking all up and down creation, filling up most of a 256MB SD card, hopefully learning what this thing can do. I took some pictures on the Big Creek Greenway in Alpharetta and some assorted sights within walking distance of my apartment, which included the ruins of the Hargrove House on Windy Hill, a billboard on Cobb Parkway advising everyone to remain afraid and listen to news radio, some guy driving a Corvette Stingray, and a big inflatable shark.
Photo browsers seem to be a very personal thing, best used with a “not invented here” attitude, so I’ll probably be slapping one of those together sometime soon. To start out, I just want something to display the pictures that are in a directory, perhaps with some EXIF tag information, but it’ll probably go well beyond that into something that includes a message board, search engine, IRC client, web browser, and so much more. So, be patient, fair reader; I’ll have more ways to waste your bandwidth soon.