I Fought the Law

Messin' Around with the New Camera

After Dr. M and I participated in a photo scavenger hunt earlier this month, we realized that our faithful digital camera, that we've had since before we were married, that has traveled with us around the globe and documented so many great moments in our lives, and whose technological wonders have been disproportionately dedicated to taking uninteresting pictures of our cats, was finally crapping out on us. Some pictures were unexplainably grainy, and some were just weird. For example, in the presence of a bright glare, the camera would begin to see the world through rose-colored glasses:

So, we bought ourselves a new digital camera, which arrived last week. Our aim was to acquire an updated, fancier version of our old one, since until the aforementioned out-crapping it performed exceedingly well and took very handsome pictures. The new one has a higher resolution, which we knew going in. Here is a picture we might not have been able to take with the old camera:

The detail of Ruby's reflection in the window is, I think, rather neat.

Yesterday, Dr. M was looking through the manual and messing around with the camera and discovered some additional features that we then proceeded to spend a great deal of time playing around with. For example, you can set the camera to only pick up one color:

When we discovered this, we tried to take a picture where only the blue of my eyes would show up, but it wasn't working well. The closest we got was this:

Upon closer inspection, we found that the blue in this shot wasn't really my irises, but the reflection of a nearby blue pillow. If you look closely, you can also see the reflection of Dr. M in my pupil, along with the shadows of the blinds:

As I said, very high resolution. Needless to say, we were eager to jump back into our tradition of using the camera on the cats. Unfortunately, color effects aren't terribly striking when you have a grey-and-white cat and a black-and-white cat. Here's a shot of Ruby with only the yellows picked up:

The camera also has a "color swap" function, where you can take one color and change it into another. Unfortunately the camera is extremely discriminating, and generally regards different shades of the same color as different colors. This can make it difficult for the color effects to come out properly. I tried to turn Pepe white, and he ended up looking like either a ghost or something that Predator would see:

"Green Pepe" came out a bit better:

We have until October to perfect our stupid camera tricks before we unleash our new-found talents on our hapless baby. I will probably limit the number of baby pictures on the blog, however, since the kid might want to be President some day.

Posted by hb at March 30, 2008 10:27 AM