Digital Photography
(Choose One) Rocks | Sucks
A typical day with these not-yet-typical cameras
8:00am. The wind is swirling and from the looks of our neighborhood, it has rained all night. We’re wimps out here in California—a half-inch of rain overnight is a monsoon as far as we’re concerned. As I survey the wreckage that is our backyard, I see that the sky is not the only place from which it is raining. One of our automatic sprinkler controls has blown its top and is shfitzing all over the side of the house.
“There’s one trip to Home Depot that I’m not looking forward to,” I think to myself, imagining the consequence to my psyche when I walk into the haven for all who are Mr. Know-it-All, with the daunting task of describing my predicament. “I need to replace the little doo-hickie,” I’m liable to say, “that goes atop the thingamabob that turns my sprinklers on and off. And then I need you to tell me how to install the doo-hickie. Better yet, could you just come over to my house later today, say about 11am?”
I might be a loser to the Home Depot set, but I’m also a nerd, and that gives me a leg up on the other losers. So I grab my digital camera, head outside, snap about 10 shots from all angles and distances, and drive purposefully to Home Depot.
“Here,” I say triumphantly, practically shoving the LCD display of the camera in Mr. Know-it-all’s face. “This top part is leaking and needs to be replaced.
“Oh, you need a new solenoid control, and probably a sensor,” comes the incomprehensible response.
“All I know is that I need one of these. Please help me locate it.”
I go home, fix the doo-hickie, and make a mental note to rent Revenge of the Nerds tonight. I LOVE MY DIGITAL CAMERA!
10:00am. Jody, my trusty office manager, informs me that we still have about a dozen conference T-shirts and tote bags left over and that we should try to sell them. Tossing up an order form on our secure server is the easy part; enticing people to buy the shirts is the hard part. I immediately think of Cary Anne, that babe—um, the attractive young lady who works at the after-school daycare down the street. She says she is willing to model the shirt for me and so I grab the digital and head over to school.
We find a good backdrop, and I use the LCD monitor to position her in the frame. She enjoys acting like a model, I enjoy pretending to be a photographer, and neither one of us is in a hurry. Five minutes later, after all of the framing and pretending, we’re ready to shoot.
Correction. I am, but the camera’s not. Too much framing with the LCD monitor—the batteries are all dead. Aarrgghh! I HATE MY DIGITAL CAMERA!
I race home, all the way praying that I remembered to place my spare set of rechargeable batteries in the charger. I didn’t, so I have to use a fresh set of regular batteries, knowing full well that they’ll be equally dead in about five minutes.
Okay, I exaggerate, but the cold fact remains that digital cameras and their cute little LCD monitors positively eat batteries. [Editor’s note: It’s much better today, but still, using the LCD monitor consumes battery life at a faster pace than using the flash.] I learn through multiple miserable experiences to use the LCD only to survey the photos afterward. I take the pictures the old-fashioned way, by shoving my eye into the doinky little viewfinder.
Once we get going, however, I’m the total stud photographer. Film? What film?? I’m a stud photographer and I’ll snap as many shots as I see fit. Let’s try a few more from the profile...good, now let’s have you hang the bag from the other shoulder...look at me...good, now look away...great, now angle away from me and gaze over your shoulder...
Together we check out the photos, determining which angle and pose are the best, and we shoot a few more that way. By now, there are several kids and a few parents watching, and they think that we’re pros.
Reality check: All I’m trying to do is get one decent 300-pixel wide photo onto my Web site; we’re not trying for Life Magazine here. But that’s the beauty of going digital—it costs me nothing (okay, a bit of battery life, but practically nothing) to take a few more until I get it right. And I know immediately if and when I get it right, not one hour and one round-trip to the drug store later. The photo works, as we sell almost all of our extra totes and shirts.
With my digital camera, I tend to take more photos in order to get that one good one. That quite literally makes me a better photographer. I LOVE MY DIGITAL CAMERA!
Noon. I know it’s around here somewhere...I just had it. Maybe the dog ate it...we don’t have a dog...maybe we had a dog, he ate it, then ran away, and that’s why I can’t find it. Maybe I’m losing my mind.
I refer, of course, to the small (at the moment, seemingly microscopic) removable storage card that shuttles between the camera and my computer. It’s missing, and without it, my camera is a useless toy. Now if I were using my conventional camera, I would just head to the kitchen desk and pop in a new roll of film, or worst case, run down the street to the 7/11 and buy some film. But our 7/11 doesn’t yet carry CompactFlash cards. I cuss at my keyboard (why cuss at myself when I can misdirect anger at my computer??) as I URL my way to gadgets.com and order not one, not two, but three extra flash cards. I HATE MY DIGITAL CAMERA!!
2:30pm. Our insurance agent calls—this can only be bad. She’s going to jack up our rates unless we can demonstrate to her that our house is safe from burglary threats. The perimeter security, motion sensor, auto-dial 911 system, and the fact that we live in an ultra-safe neighborhood is of no concern to this nazi—um, to this concerned professional. She wants to know if we have deadbolts on our doors.
“Of course we do.”
“We’re going to need to see them, and in the meantime, we can’t offer you coverage”
“But Ms. Nazi, can’t you take my word for it until you verify it?”
“The problem is that many of our customers don’t know what a deadbolt is. It’s not that we don’t trust you, it’s that we can’t be certain that you aren’t looking at the regular doorknob and thinking that it’s a deadbolt.”
I’m not making this up. I’m not sure if we’re in good hands, if they are like a good neighbor, or if we own a piece of their rock. I just know that if I weren’t laughing so hard, I’d be incensed with insult.
“Ms. Nazi, do you have an Internet mail address? You do? Good...and do you know what an attachment is? (Now it’s my turn...) It’s not that I think you’re stupid or anything, but many people see that little envelope icon, and they think they are supposed to go to their front door and wait for a letter to show up.
Okay, so I don’t really say that part; instead, I ask her to watch her inbox, and when a message from me arrives, to double-click the things at the bottom that say frontdoor.jpg and backdoor.jpg. Digital camera to the rescue: Two clicks later (I don’t take multiples of these; who cares if I use good composition for a lousy door?) and I have my oh-so-precious proof of deadboltdom. I decide to leave out the part about how easy it would have been to fire up PHOTO-PAINT and superimpose a deadbolt on a door that doesn’t have one.
I LOVE MY DIGITAL CAMERA...
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Try as I might to create a clever hook or element of uncertainty for this article, it’s really a no-brainer. A digital camera remains one of the coolest things that anyone who takes photos can purchase. And the surprising part of the story is how low the buy-in is, depending upon your application. If you want to use your digital camera to take photos that look and feel like the prints you get back from the developer, then yes, you will need to invest a few hundred dollars (although you are wise to resist the allure of the new 4-megapixel generation unless you truly need 8 x 10 prints of your masterpieces). But if you just want a camera to email photos to insurance nazis, not feel like a dork at Home Depot, place images on your Web site, or—and this is one of the best reasons of all time—to send pictures from your vacation to all of your envious friends back home, you’d be amazed at how little camera you need.
From my daughter Erica’s ninth birthday slumber party comes this photo, taken on a Kodak DC50, a camera that was made in 1994, and looks and feels like a thermos. Not to suggest that you go quite to this extreme, but the DC50 sells on eBay today for about $25, and cameras twice as good and twice as new sell for barely $50.
Images destined to stay on screen simply do not need as much fidelity as those heading for print. And images created for a website (typically resampled down for faster downloading) are more forgiving still. The digital camera that I use most often is my two-year-old Kodak DC-280, a 2.0 megapixel model that is supremely easy to use and (perhaps more important) very easy to remember how to use after a month or two of inactivity. eBay wants about $100 for them—solidly in just about anybody’s holiday gift gadget price range. And if my circle of friends are any indication, this is the year that many of them take the digital photography plunge.