New Toy

We bought ourselves a new camera! (I love this new 'we' thing that allows me to share my expenses and hence everything becomes half price. Of course there are twice as many things to get, but since for me shopping is 90% of the fun, it's all good!).

Since TS is such a photo-buff, and he's taught me a thing or two on the trips we've taken to India, Oz and Thailand, my little digital IXUS just seemed a bit inadequate. It take great idiot proof pictures, but I felt a bit left out when we were shooting a great sunset and I couldn't add any manual functions. So in a little trade-up (Thanks Taylors), we've gotten ourselves a Canon PowerShot S3 IS.

It's not an SLR, but it has plenty of manual functions and a 12X (!!!!!!!!!!!!!) optical zoom as well as super-macro mode (I LOVE taking things up close), and most-importantly, I can switch it to full-auto mode in the event that I'm lazy, TS is not around to tell me what settings to use, or I discover that my attempt to manually control the images turns out crap.

Anyway, taken about 50 photos so far, and most of them suck. It seems I should have read the manual first. The only three (half) decent ones follow.

Longans at breakfast. I know it's not a terribly interesting photo, but look how SHARP the fruit are!

Nin's home-cooked Nasi Lemak with fried chicken, sambal prawns, omelette, ikan bilis and peanuts, fried fish and cucumber. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm. I'll admit it here, the picture is terrible, the food takes ALL the credit.

The third ever picture taken with the new camera (the first two were foggy and for 5 min I didn't figure out that it was from condensation on the lens - cold shop, hot carpark). An SBS bus zooming down Orchard Road. Or rather a very slow SBS bus, and even slower shutter speed (is that the correct term to use?). I know it's not very well composed, but I like the colours and the movement effect!

Ok, so I promise to take more lessons and brush up on the technical details, cannot wait to get to Australia in 3 (!) weeks.

PS, the new S5 is out. It's 8 megapixels vs our 6, and has an attachment for a slave (?) flash, plus some kind of updated processor, but for 20% less money we thought we'd just get this. Anyway, we can always find someone to help us UPGRADE when the time is right....