Replacing my Camera

In case you didn't read it, I did a big boo boo with my camera last week while on the Tour of California. First of all, I think I dropped it one too many times, and the LCD display was not as clear anymore. One side of the LCD display would appear much darker than the other, and since it didn't have an external viewfinder, taking pictures was a little difficult to see exactly what I was taking. Plus, it was raining while I was taking pictures, so some water may have gotten inside.

I think I inadvertently, or maybe subconsciously, left it in the hotel in Modesto. I still had my Blackberry, but I had some problems with the internal MicroSD card being recognized by my Blackberry, so I had no internal storage for pictures. So I thought when I took a picture with my Blackberry, I could offload it by sending it to Facebook or to my email account. For some reason, the quality of those pics were really poor. I attribute it to lack of available flash memory, so I gave up trying to take pictures with it on the tour.

After coming back, I decided to try futzing with the memory issue again. So I the 4 GB MicroSD card again, but still it didn't recognize it. So finally, I do the Microsoft thing ... turn it off, turn it back on, and still nothing. Next, turn off the phone, take out the battery, put the battery back in, turn it on, and whaddayaknow ... it works now. Damn ... and I could have used this to take pictures the last few days of the tour, especially the last day for Cole Grade. I guess it's Murphy's Law at work.

I also replaced my digital compact camera, got a Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS ... ya know, the one Maria Sharapova advertises. Was it the technical specs of the camera or Maria that sold it to me? hmmm.



I was torn on this one ... it does have a good aperture range, f2.8-4.9, but the focal length is not as high as I would like ... 6.2-18 mm. I saw some others where the focal length went up to 28 or even 32 mm, but the aperture was f3.5-5.6 ... so I decided to go with the better aperture, and faster lense.

I'll be able to test it out today on my Mellow Ride. I didn't feel like killing myself, since I haven't been on a ride in over 2 weeks. No Gladiator for this guy this weekend.