New Toy

I don't remember exactly when I bought it, but I've had my little point-and-click camera for at least five years. A great deal of research went into my choice and I've been very very happy with my little Fuji Finepix f31fd. It has 6 megapixels (which was pretty reasonable back in the day) and takes excellent low-light pictures, plus, it fits in my pocket (thus making possible the FB album: Crazy Things I See While Walking About).

However, in the past few months, it has begun displaying a little bit of a petulant temperament. Somehow a bit of dust had made it inside the body and showed up as a gray blur the upper right-hand corner of all my pictures. Most of the time this was easily Photoshopped out, but more recently the power button occasionally doesn't work. I was able to work around this development, but over time it became more frequent and more annoying.

While it might be endearing for a little while, I fully recognize that anytime an electronic toy starts displaying any sort of "character trait", it's really a symptom of a dying machine. I worked around the idiosyncrasies for a few months but, the longer it went, the more nervous I became about it spontaneously giving up the ghost. That would be a major issue for this shutter-happy girl.

So, the last couple weeks I've been doing some research and comparisons and, last Friday, my brand new camera arrived in the mail. Wohoo!

I went with another Fuji ('cuz I love the Li-on rechargeable battery) and I settled on the Finepix F500EXR. This one is slick! It has 16 megapixels and is black and sleeker than my old one, so it'll still fit in my pocket plus it has lots of schnazzy features (that I'm still getting the hang of) that make it a nice blend between a simple point-and-shoot and a real SLR.

Tonight I took it to Activity Days to test out it's high-speed shooting for when the girls were playing Water Balloon Vollyball.

I feel like the colors were a little washed out and over-exposed, so I'll have to play around some more, of course. But still, I got some good action shots!