Camera review!

Soooo a few months ago I bought a new camera as a birthday gift to myself. I haven't used it too much (for the few photos I take for this blog and the baking blog, I usually just grab our smaller point-and-shoot), but we took it to Atlanta on our babymoon.

The one consistent drawback I read about this camera proved true for me, too. The complete user's manual doesn't come with the camera. It's available to download, but it is lengthy, and if you need to print it out, you're looking at killing quite the forest. Before our trip to Atlanta, I was going through the PDF'd manual, trying to find sections that I thought would be most useful and easiest to master in a short period of time. I printed out a few sections and practiced using the different settings the morning before our trip. I was no expert, but I was at least becoming more familiar with the camera's options.

One of the coolest options I found was an "Aquarium" mode. Score! I used that one a lot. I checked around some of the other options, read about how to use the video mode and made sure I had our point-and-shoot just in case I was a total failure with the new camera.

Detailed starfish photo at the aquarium. I love the way the water looks in this image.

But the camera took amazing photos. I love it. It *is* bulkier, I treat it like it is made of eggshells and I often felt like I wasn't taking sophisticated-enough photos with it, but given the fact that I had it for a few days before our trip and we were busy prepping the condo for new carpet, I didn't want to get too fancy and not be able to enjoy our trip because I was worried about mastering manual settings. I am very glad now that I didn't go with a dSLR, because I can't imagine how I'd feel not using a camera like that to its full potential, and this one has amazing options and gives me fantastic results. This camera is much better than our little point-and-shoot and has enough features to make me feel like optimistically overwhelmed at the possibilities yet adequate and capable of being a better photographer.

I played with some of the options as the carpet guys were working, but there is only so much detail you can extract from photos of a lens cap or a camera box when you're playing around. I think when I have a newborn subject to photograph I'll be able to make better use of some of the features, like blink detection, image stabilizer and color accents, and the settings that don't involve aquariums, like sunset, fireworks and portrait.

I think I used the nighttime setting for this photo. I love the colors.

The image quality is great, and I love the LCD display. I really like the pop-up flash, too, as it is easy to turn on and off and doesn't feel flimsy, which was a concern I had with some other cameras I considered.

We sat two sections up and quite a ways over from homeplate during a Braves/Reds game, but the zoom feature is amazing.

The video feature is also very cool, and I'm looking forward to using that function when Elle gets here. It is amazingly easy to use, and the plus of taking video from my digital camera is that is so much more convenient to upload than when I take video with my actual video camera. The video below looks like poor quality because compressing it was the only way I could get Blogger to upload it this year, but when I open it on my Mac and have it in full screen mode, it looks crystal clear and made me feel like I was back in that huge exhibit at the aquarium.