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I hate my new camera!
Ugh. I bought a new camera yesterday. Because I’m spoiled and I’m married to a photographer and I can’t stand letting one day go by without documenting it with five hundred pictures. Also, the sand castle festival is coming up and Heather B is visiting. The thought of those two events going by without a camera is more than my blogging heart can bear.
So, I broke down and bought a mom camera. A camera that cannot be broken by sand or water or a sippy cup spilling on it in my purse. It’s waterproof and smash proof. I think I could dip it in apple sauce and then drive over it with my car and it will still be okay. In other words, it’s Brenda proof.
But that wasn’t enough, I also bought a two year warranty because apparently one out of ten of these things is defective and I want to be able to take it back and get a new one if I am that unlucky tenth person. Which I usually am unless I buy the warranty, of course. Four hundred bucks later (a whole month’s worth of freelance pay) I have the ugliest camera on the planet. I’m almost embarrassed to be seen with it.
I hate it! It’s terrible. It’s like the mini-van of cameras. I am a die hard canon fan and this is like forcing me to drive a Chrysler after I’ve been driving an Audi for five years. It’s slow. It’s ugly and it has mushy breaks. Plus, it has all these features with icons that make me feel like I’m dumb. It’s like the adult version of a FisherPrice camera. Push this button to print. Push that button to make a movie. And if you can’t read, don’t worry there’s a picture of a dog so you know to select that feature if you want to take a picture of your dog. Actually the icons are kind of cute but there are so many of them.
The thing is like a little mini computer. You can pretty much do everything on your camera that I would normally do on my computer in photoshop. There are filters so you can turn your picture any color of the rainbow. You can crop. You can add effects. You can pretty much design a four color brochure and send it to press from your camera. Just kidding. But it is overkill for someone like me. That’s what you pay graphic designers to do. There shouldn’t be a function on your camera for turning a picture orange. It’s just overkill.
The only person I can imagine loving this camera would be a really really really bored grandmother on a cruise ship with nothing to do all day long but play with her camera. (Nothing against grandmothers.) Maybe that grandmother has bad eyesight so the super big buttons and giant lcd screen are just the thing. Oh and maybe they dropped it overboard while they were in Cabo and some nice scuba diver caught it and returned it to them with pictures and a movie of a dolphin.
Actually, I think this camera is the answer to every focus group complaint that ever existed. It is absolutely completely idiot proof. Which should be perfect for me. The thing is. I’m not ready to admit I’m an idiot. I’m supposed to be some kind of Artist! Photographer! etc etc. I can’t be carrying around some dolt camera.
Maybe I should just stop getting sand in my camera.
But it does take decent pictures at the beach… so maybe I’ll just suck up my pride and use it anyway.
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Q and R
I’m up a creek (or “crick” as my Aunt Marge would say). I broke my camera again. It’s that blasted sand. Every time I go to the beach I somehow manage to get sand in my camera. Toby says, “Why aren’t you more careful?” I say, “You take a nearly two-year-old to the beach and be more careful. Well see how long that lasts.”
What am I supposed to do? Let her run off into the surf while I carefully put my camera in it’s cover and then seal it in a plastic bag before I toss it into my purse? I guess I just can’t take my camera to the beach and that is sad sad sad because I am sick and tired of taking pictures of Baby Bug in the house and trying to rearrange my shot so that my myriad of carpet stains don’t show. Ugh.
I love the beach but I hate sand. It just gets in the little camera lens mechanism and click, crack, croak. No more pictures. So what does that mean? I’m going to be stuck uploading illustrations for a while, which is kind of a drag considering my latest paranoia regarding illos getting stolen. But you know… life goes on. If I add up all the positive things that this site has brought me and all the business it’s brought me for sharing my work, it far outweighs the damage that was done by one illo being stolen.
My illos get stolen all the time. I know this. It’s the nature of the web. People use them to litter up their myspace web pages. People paste them into forums. Even though I don’t love it, this doesn’t really bother me anymore. Every once in a while I go play myspace smackdown but it’s too much work. It’s not worth it. I know that people who steal will always have to steal while all I have to do if I want something new is close my eyes and imagine it.
The reason the whole momsbuzz thing got me was because that image belonged to someone. I should have never put it up on the web in the first place. It also burned me up that they might make a profit off it. But momsbuzz assured me that they didn’t make a penny off cafepress. I believe them too. The image was low res and would have looked terrible printed on a t-shirt. If they did sell anything they would have to refund that customer their money back. Seventy-two dot per inch images do NOT look good on press.
Besides nobody makes money off cafepress. They place the base price so high, you have to charge $20 a t-shirt in order to make two bucks. I charge a dollar or two on my cafepress and I think I’ve made $40 over the course of a year. Just enough to spend it right back on my own t-shirts.
I know I should address the fact that they probably made some change over all the traffic we sent that way but I’m tired. I’m not out to sue anybody. I don’t want a lawsuit. I’m happy it’s over. I most definitely don’t want to ever see any of my images stolen by that artist again but for now I am putting this issue to bed.
I do want to start some kind of awareness regarding theft on the internet. I want to help people protect themselves. I wish I could develop some kind of third party program that puts a watermark automatically on all your uploaded flickr pictures so you don’t have to re-upload but that’s way out of my league. I can barely create an action in photoshop let alone write a program. Who knows maybe one already exists.
Yikes! This post is getting long. All I really wanted to say was I’m uploading letters because my camera is broken and somehow I got way way way way down here on a tangent.
I’m over it! I promise! Over. Finito. Done.
Get your letters here.Oh no! You missed the free letter download. Stay tuned. They will be released again for sale in my shop.
