First Photos With My New Toy

Yesterday, Ginny bought me a new toy.

No special occasion, a just for the hell of it gift.

Now, I own a brand new Aries Mini Digital Camera, Model ATC-0103.

Hoot!

Of course, I snapped a photo of her across the table from me in a fast food restaurant as the first picture with my new camera:

Over our coffee we talked about how in the Bible God broke into peoples lives while the people engaged in ordinary, everyday activities—fishing, herding sheep, thrashing grain, filling out tax forms. The Lord of all creation is Lord of ordinary days.

My own ordinary activities recently involve correcting proof copy for my book A Dirty Old Man Goes To The Dogs. Two things impress me about this manuscript:

First, some sections are really good. That surprises me. Once I write a piece, I’m inclined to forget it and dismiss it as over and done with, so when I re-read it months later, it amazes me that I could have written so well. I mean this book is not terrible awful.

The other impressive thing is how many mistakes I make. I mean, I have gone over manuscript drafts before submitting it to the printer. Even so, I’m finding typos (our for out; and form for from are two I make all the time). I’m finding I misuse words that sound similar but have different meanings (such as fine and find). I’m finding inconsistencies in numbers. And I find that I should have stayed awake in seventh grade English grammar when they taught the use of commas…or should that word be comas?

Anyhow, such stuff occupies my ordinary activities over recent days.

Once we got home, I played with my new camera some. Here’s a photo of my pipes and ashtray:

The little camera works fine, but my shaking hands blur the picture. (An age-related nerve thing sometimes causes me to wobble a bit).

The camera’s best feature is that it has only two buttons: on/off and snap photo. That’s just my speed.

I mean we own this other digital camera that offers 837 features and settings. I think it has settings for taking pictures of flowers, one for pictures of mountains, one for portraits. I think there’s one setting for photographing male turtles and another for female turtles—it won’t work if you can’t tell the difference (fortunately, I can).This camera has a day/month and year timer and a setting for getting close-ups of coins. It will pop corn. It will calculate logarithms. I think there’s even a taser setting in case you want to take photos of unconscious people.

I can’t work that camera! I must have 600 photos of my own feet from when I lowered that camera before it finished focusing on the scene I was trying to photograph.

However, my new mini digital camera has advanced to the high point in technology that it only has two buttons and I can actually take pictures with it.

There is no flash attachment so the lens gathers available light—like so:

This morning, my friend Wes treated me to breakfast at one of the worst restaurants either of us has ever been in and I snapped this photo of him beside a waterfall/fountain in the dining room:

Again, it’s my shaking hands that cause the blurring.

One of the best things I like about my new toy is that this camera dangles from my keychain; yes it is that small. I can always have it handy in case I see something beautiful I want to capture. For instance, when we finally got out of that restaurant, across a parking lot, I saw this distinct weather front moving into Jacksonville:

It spanned from horizon to horizon—miles and miles of straight-line storm clouds, every inch with a bright silver lining in the morning sun.

Yes, I am ready to photograph anything I come across now.

That reminds me, Saturday while browsing over old diaries in a book store, I came across this anecdote about photography:

A reporter asked Marilyn Monroe, “Is it true that you posed for those pictures with nothing on at all”?

Marilyn replied, “Certainly that’s not true. The whole time I was posing I kept my radio on”.