Robot Dreams

Another year goes by, and my nephew is one year older. Today I went to Dante's birthday party. It wasn't a big party like the early years, but there was a pinata (sorry no pictures of that one). The really important parts of any birthday party where there, friends, presents, and food. Speaking of which here are two of those important items:

As to the order of importance of those two, that is a constant battle!

Being the photo-traditionalist I am, I've resisted buying a digital camera for a long time. But, there are situations when my film SLR just isn't convenient enough. So a few days ago I got new compact digital camera. Yea I know, going from a totally old-style manual SLR, to a totally automatic compact digital is a drastic move. But I wanted something very convenient seeing as I needed something I can carry everywhere. I did have to make some compromises, the biggest being that the "manual" mode the new camera has is not really manual. Which means I'll be spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to convince the camera to focus correctly. Yesterday in my usual walking about in Evanston I took a few pictures...

The camera that took those is a FujiFilm FinePix F31fd. It's one of the best compact cameras around, in that it's SuperCCD sensor does a very good job of capturing detail at a wide range of ISOs. That wide range of ISOs is the one aspect I didn't want to give up from my SLR accustomed picture taking.