Manuals and Manual

First of all, I want to say thank you for the many kind comments you all left on my last post. I felt better immediately after I hit publish. And then after having read your comments, truly appreciated what great friends/readers I have. Not to mention, it was good to know that I'm certainly not alone in feeling this way every now and again.

I do have to admit though, that I felt better immediately after hitting publish for another entirely different reason as well. It meant I could play with my new camera! It was delivered as I was drafting that post. And let me tell you, it was like Christmas at that moment. I practically tackled the poor FedEx guy who delivered it. He must have thought I was crazy because he also knew I had been virtually stalking him all day. I had to sign for the package otherwise they wouldn't leave it. I was practically perched at my window when the truck pulled up not wanting to miss him. I raced downstairs to greet the guy and he's says to me:

Are you Amy?
Yes.
You've been checking this haven't you?
Yes.
More than three times?
Oh yeah, a lot more than three times.
Yeah, I know. This things goes off every time you check (he says pointing to his scanner/signature machine)
Oh really?
Yeah, you almost wore my battery out.

End scene.

But I have my camera now. I've taken a couple hundred pics since getting it and am completely and totally smitten. It's features are so much more intuitive to the way I shoot, and I can control a lot more of the manual features a lot easier. Actually all it has are manual features. There's no full-on auto setting for this camera. It can go partially auto, but it's always going to want me to make some kind of decision. That's just fine by me. I've shot full on manual for most of this past year.

I did run into a bit of a snag with it this morning. I started processing some of the many images I've taken over the past few days. You see, I'm trying to make sure I have all of the kinks worked out before tomorrow morning. I've got a photo shoot then and want to be confident enough with this camera to use it. I am but it's gonna change the way I do things. I won't get into specifics because I'll bore you all and myself to death with the details. However, I will say that it's not completely compatible with the version of photoshop that I have and that threw me for a loop this morning.

So what you'd probably wondering is, so how do your pics look. They look good. Here are just a few shots I took while walking around Millennium Park on my Friday lunch hour:

Funny side note: I was not planning on taking these dudes picture. But as I was walking by, the one in the white shirt said, "Hey! Take our picture." I said, "Why would you want me to take your picture?" He said "Because you have a camera." It seemed as good a reason as any, and since I wanted to see how my new camera took portraits, I did. The pose though, the pose was all theirs.

When I went to Millennium Park, I also took my manual. Yes, I am the girl who reads her camera manual.  I took it specifically because there is one big feature of this camera that my old one didn't have. I had no idea how to use this new setting but thanks to my manual I figured it out. So what does it do? It does this:



Now I don't plan on adding video to my repertoire. As you can tell by the shaky video above, it's not really my forte. But it's nice to have it. And the quality is so much better than the video on my point and shoot.

So yeah! I have a new camera!