Saturday 2 April 2005

Pic of the day: Hewlett-Packard Photosmart R607. Sorry about the blurry quality, the picture was taken with my old camera.

Camera obscura

For a few days now, I have been thinking about getting a new digicam. Today I bought one. Given my attitude toward rampant consumerism, I should probably justify the purchase. My old digicam was from the 90es sometime, probably not very long before I started the JPG diary in summer 1998, but at least a bit older. It still works, ironically, unlike the lamps. But even its "high quality" pictures have quite low resolution. It cannot zoom in any way, and cannot take closer up pictures than around portrait distance. It must have some kind of light adjustment, since I can use it both indoors and outdoors, but the adjustment is limited by today's standards. The number of pictures it can store at any time is 20 (unless you reduce the resolution from poor to downright shoddy), and it can not be fitted with a memory card or any such thing. In short, an impressive piece of workmanship but definitely previous century.

When this HP camera was on sale (I have personally very good experiences with HP equipment for around 25 years), I decided it was time to act. There are smaller cameras around, but this goes nicely into a pocket, which is also a big deal. With the larger camera I had, there was a difference between "going out" and "going out to take pictures". Photography was a separate act that required carrying around a camera. With the small new one, it becomes part of the clothes like MP3 player and pocket PC. (As would mobile phone have been, if I talked to people and not just to computers.) These gadgets simply are there, augmenting the human body and mind seamlessly, almost like the wrist watch gave us an accurate sense of time. I suppose GPS would fit into the same category. I'll consider it if I have to move to an unfamiliar place again ... I get lost very easily.

Now that I have explained that it was all a very rational decision, let me briefly mention the fact that I bought it because I wanted some cool new gadget. I could have lived with the old for another decade and you would never have known, I guess. After all, I usually illustrate with screenshots these days. Despite all the good explanations I came up with, I bought it because I wanted it. Don't under-estimate the desires of the soul. While not as spectacular as those of the flesh, they can be quite expensive and distracting.

In the shop, I had only seen its front. Seeing the rest of the camera was a small shock. It is packed with small buttons (what kinds of fingers do these people have?), some obvious and some obscure in the extreme. The LCD screen taking up a bit of the back displays pictures and can be used before you take the picture (although the small optical viewfinder is recommended). But it is also a computer screen that can show a number of menus and even give critique of your photographs, recommending ways to do better in the future! 0_0

I still haven't read the whole of the manual that came with the camera. I hope I don't need to. I know the basics by now, enought to go out and take pictures, and enough to transfer them to my computer. Perhaps I will eventually figure out the multitude of options. Perhaps I won't need them. I don't plan to take video sequences or add sound to my pictures. I don't even plan to take panorama pictures. But if I stay alive (and today has been my best day since I fell ill almost 3 weeks ago), I will probably use more photographs from real life for a while. Even though they draw less "hits" than anime pictures.

("Camera obscura" means "dark room", as in "chamber" and "obscure" in modern English. Before the invention of photography, letting light fall through a small hole into a dark room enabled a picture to form on a canvas, so you could paint strikingly realistic paintings. Later the same technology was used with photographic plates, and it kept shrinking until this day.)