New Camera (4)

I got a “new” camera yesterday. It’s not new, it’s used. It’s a Canon PowerShot A40.

I saw it on craigslist for $20. I was thinking maaaaybe the memory card I have in my other camera might fit.

Yeah, not even close. Here’s the new one.

It new memory card cost $32. And I have yet another memory card in my phone. Why can’t they all use the same stuff? Bleh.

The main reason I got the camera is that it seems to be able to do the stuff my old camera-phone does—sepia, manual control of brightness, etc—and probably a lot of what my other camera does. That one is basically a “point and click” type thing.

The “new” one has an “auto” setting which means the camera decides what to do based on the conditions it’s sensing.  (That’s sort of what the “old” one does.) But the manual setting has a lot of options, which seem to use some photography-oriented terminology. That means I’ll have to learn what that stuff means, and that’s good.  

I’m hoping I can just use this one “new” camera instead of using both the other camera and the old phone. Plus it looks like a camera. Sure, I guess that’s a vanity issue—that it looks like a camera instead of a phone. But I do feel that if I’m using something that looks like a camera, people will take me more seriously. Obviously, that’s not so much for the naked self-portraits, but for taking pictures of other people and things, which I’ve been continuing to do some. (See my tumblr.) 

Oh yeah... I downloaded the manual, which is about 180 pages long, hoping it’d help me figure out some basic how-to stuff. But I don’t know if I have the patience to go through that whole thing. Maybe I’ll just experiment and try to figure out what works.

My using this camera will be dependent on whether I can get the pictures to leave the camera and go into my computer. I plugged it into my computer last night, and the driver failed to install, twice. So I looked for some help online, and eventually found a couple of people who’d had the same problem. And I submitted an email question at Canon’s website this morning. The solution is basically this: it’s a 10-year old camera and the current versions of windows aren’t gonna work directly with this camera; you’ll have to get a memory card reader, which should be relatively inexpensive.

So, I shall be looking for an inexpensive memory card reader while I’m out this afternoon. (I think I’m gonna see a movie.)