Went shopping for a battery charger yesterday. Nobody has'em. ..Stupid camera uses an exclusive battery and an exclusive charger, that'll only work for the G1 and the G2. Bedford Camera has the whole kit, ..car adapter and AC adapter and dual battery charger and direct camera power cord, ..for a nice low price of $175. Swell. I wanna have a powered camera by Saturday. Gotta do somethin.

While there I talked to Lee Coleman, the same guy who sold me my Canon SLR. Guy knows alot. Good photographer too. I find it much more enjoyable to talk to a proffesional than try to get any information out of a crackwhore at Best Buy or Circuit City. The prices are a tad bit higher at a locally owned camera store than at a big electronics superchain, but in the end, by going to a specialized store you get 3 things:

1. You talk to camera people. Generally, camera people know about cameras. Camera people can talk intelligently about things such as, ...cameras.

2. Best Buy has things called "warranties," but they invlove giving your camera away for 3 months, and finding out at the end of 3 months that they can't fix your camera, or that the camera has been lost while in route to a big mega-camera-repair-complex, somewhere in Arizona.

3. You get the satisfaction of supporting a locally owned business, not a big super chain that staffs people to watch you on camera and pad you down upon exit.

It turns out that getting digital prints from a cd or compact flash card, ..actually costs less than film prints. ...And oddly enough, the film prints AND digital prints get processed by the same machine, ..which is hooked up to both a film, and digital pre-processor. Machines are cool. Maybe I'll burn a dozen or so of my fav digital photos to a cd and get prints. Prolly so.

Bought me a conversion lens adapter. Sweet. Now I can use a wide angle or macro lens, but for now all I've got is a PL filter that will reduce reflections and increase the color contrast for sunny shots.

Also got a nice deal on a 64 mb compact flash card. It'll be nice to worry less about storage. Should be able to store around 120 images instead of 30, and still carry around the 16 mb card as a backup. Maybe I can use all this cool stuff when the camera has, sufficient power to turn on.

Posted by drew at April 10, 2002 03:42 PM