It really saddens me, because I have to take several shots to get one good one, and miss a LOT of opportunities because my compact won't start up fast enough to get the shot. It also lacks any sort of manual focus, and can't see in the dark--that is, indoors in normal light. Did I mention it's only 3MP? So, tiny shots that work on the web, and if I can get my subject to freeze for 1/4 second, I can print up to about 8x10 without anybody complaining (much) about image quality.
Maybe I should get an optical slave and a super-flash. It's easy to sneak up on the deer with a guide number of 240! :) Not so easy to hide the gnats in the near-distance with such a flash, though. It makes me cry to remember that I sold my film SLR system for less than $500... I sure miss it now.
The bright news is that I got a new Mac mini. Well, the dark side is that I had to... one of the shots in God's assault on my attempt to spend $1,000 on a camera was a broken computer. :) I've wanted to get a new computer for a couple of years now, but thought my old one would work a while longer. I'm happy with the new one, but it's a bittersweet happiness: Just think of all the nice photos I could be processing on it if I had a real camera! :D Then there's the power of a "real" computer, instead of a bitty Mac mini...
I love digital imagery. It's almost as fun as the optical recording systems I remember in my dreams: Journalists with their 360- by 240-degree fly-eye camera systems, interpolative viewpoints, low-res intelligent reconstructive 3D cams...
Maybe I should stick to writing science fiction.
