In Camera

As some of you know, I'm fond of taking photographs and clogging up the internet with them posting them to Flickr. My weapon of choice for this, in recent years, has been Mrs. Ricardipus' rather nice, Zeiss-lensed Sony Cybershot DSC-R1. Which is a lovely chunk of a camera, with a big, fat (if fixed) lens, 10+ Megapixel resolution, and rather more features than I really know how to use.

However, it is too large to conveniently pop in a pocket (unless I really want to look like I'm smuggling a bomb under my coat), and is also a bit expensive to haul around while traveling. So more recently, I've taken to purchasing disposable 35mm film cameras on my trips here and there, which are a) expensive per photo, b) use film, which gets me into the whole scanning nightmare, and c) typically equipped with tiny little lenses that I swear are made of dubiously high-quality plastic. Which can sometimes give you some interesting optical distortion effects, to be sure:


Rainbows in the corners.

but are generally, in a word, crap.

Things changed a bit recently, with the appearance of a rather nice little Nikon Coolpix L16 at work. Which, conveniently, lives in my office. And also conveniently fits in a pocket, has a lens that isn't made of plastic, and takes rather nice photographs. In exchange for occasional use of this beastie, I replace the batteries on my own ticket. Seems fair, I think, and it spends its days available for taking photos of people and things in the lab when needed, like this rather fabulous microscope:


A different kind of digital camera.

Of course, it sometimes gets used for things outside the lab, too:


Parked across the street.

All of which means, of course, that I've been after a nice little point-n-shoot of my own, that I can happily take traveling, leaving the work camera where it belongs.

Which brings me to this... joy of joys, I have finally accumulated enough reward points for contributing my knowledge, wisdom and tongue-flappery (in the cyber sense) to this discussion forum, that I just ordered myself a slightly out-of-date, but still (allegedly) fabulous Sony Cybershot DSC W55. While it won't arrive before my trip to Montreal on Tuesday, and probably not before my next trip to Washington in the middle of the month, it should be well and truly in hand before the following trip to Montreal again, in January. And well available for shooting from the hip while traveling hither and thither throughout the Greater Toronto Area, like this:


This amused me slightly.

I'm very happy - it's been a long time coming. Let the flood of photos of questionable quality begin.