Capturing Christmas Vacation

One more day to go ...

I feel kind of like a kid on the last day of school. Just one more day of work and then I don't have to be back until Tuesday. Something tells me it's going to be a long day, though. In this picture, Marcy is trying to catch a snowball, but I think it looks like she's doing some sort of happy, school's out dance. It's like she knows she gets to go to Grandma's.

I'm really excited for this Christmas, because I got a new camera and I can't wait to play around with it. I love taking candid portraits of my family members when they don't know I'm doing it. I think people look so much better in pictures when they have no idea they're being taken.

So, to be a covert photo sneak, it's essential to not use a flash. I hate using a flash anyway, because it makes people look totally washed out and blows everything out so that all you have left is contrasts.

Being very poor, I have a very low-end camera that I got on sale on Black Friday. Among the joys of living in a small town is having specialty stores where you're addressed by name upon walking in the front door. You receive trustworthy advice and a never-ending free pass for asking questions of people who are experts in their field. Such is the case with Hokenson's, the camera store here in town.

Both Bill and Bob are excellent photographers who know what they're talking about, but also know how to explain everything in layman's terms. I took photography in high school, so I used to know how to use my 1970s Canon AE-1 fairly well. I also used to know how to develop black and white film. But, those days are gone, my Canon is broken and I don't have a darkroom. Seeing as film is quite expensive to develop, I decided I really wanted a digital camera.

Enter the Black Friday sale. I found some cash in a pocket and had some more money in my savings account, so I decided to check out the sales. I told Bob what I wanted and how much I had to spend. For $70 -- which was $20 less than usual -- I got an Olympus T-100.

So far, it's a great little camera. It's a 12 megapixel with 3x optical zoom. There are these neat art filters, which can distort the image and you can manually adjust all sorts of setting.

I am by no means an expert photographer, but this Christmas, I'm hoping some of the things I've learned from having to shoot at work will help out in my low-light settings.

The biggest thing is your ISO setting. The lower the light, the higher you want to set this. On my little camera, the ISO goes up to 1600, which I was recently advised is the highest you really want to set it. Any higher, and you start to get a lot of noise -- the grainy, pixelated look.

There are other settings, which I don't quite understand. Though they're the same as they were on the old AE-1, I haven't had time to read the manual to figure out which is which and how to use them. But one neat feature of my camera is it has little screens that show how changing each setting will affect the exposure. Playing around with the camera before the big event you want to shoot helps a lot. I've been having fun, and I'll continue to share tips I pick up along the way.

In the meantime, I really have to go to work. As anxious as I am not to start what promises to be a long day, I'm already late. But, with the promise of lovely vacation time on the horizon, surely my mood will be much more cheerful than my bah-humbug attitude of late.