Drive-By Shooting

I'm dog-sitting this week for my Jewish family who lives on a secluded mountaintop. While this location is mildly creepy, especially with only a big dumb black lab to provide protection, it also provides plentiful opportunities for deer spottings. This morning as I was headed down the driveway, I spotted three deer enjoying a morning nosh of...grass, I guess. Anyway, I stopped the car, dug out my phone and snapped a couple of pictures. Even though they look far away due to me not being able to figure out how to work the zoom feature on my camera phone, they were only like 20 feet from my car.





I am not a photo nazi at all, so I'm not sure what got into me, but as I continued my descent, I left my camera phone lying on the passenger seat ready to go. And as I drove the 10 miles to work, I randomly snapped some pics from behind the wheel. Which is much trickier than it sounds, trust me.



This is one of the horse pastures I go by every morning on my way to work. I like that the view in the side mirror is so crisp.

The next two pictures are two of the gazillion churches located on my route. And yes, they are all THAT enormous!





The last semi-succesful drive-by photo was supposed to be of the recently blossomed trees that are sort of visible in the upper left portion.



While I'm pretty sure it was probably not one of my bightest ideas to drive and take photos at the same time, it did make my morning commute far more interesting than it usually is.

The Magical Picture Taking Box

I really need to learn how to work my camera.

I have this digital camera. It’s a Canon Powershot A410. Which means nothing to me. I didn’t buy this camera. In fact, until I got it last year I was still relying on my trusty old Pentax circa 1994. Yeah see, I’m just really not a gadgety type of person. I hate trying to figure out technological gadgetry. I know, you’re probably thinking, “get a grip! it’s just a freakin’ digital camera – my 80 year grandmother has one!” right? It’s not like it’s some really high-tech doo-hickey…like an iPhone…or…a…spectrometer! (yeah that's right, you heard me...a spectrometer)

It’s not even one of those really slick digital cameras with all kinds of bells and whistles (lord knows something like that would send me over the edge!). It appears to be a simple enough gadget. However, this has proven to be untrue. There are many confusing options regarding flashes and zooming and foreground/background and who-knows-what-else. Combine these mysterious settings with my complete lack of knowledge in the area of photography and one ends up with photos like those below.

Dan and I went to Opryland last night to take in the spectacular Christmas light displays. As I was walking out the door of my apartment I saw my camera sitting there on my desk and in a last minute decision, I snatched it up and stuck it in my bag…just in case. Once we got there, the lights were so incredible and the sparkly festive environments so exciting, that I whipped out my camera determined to capture some of it. I would randomly push a few buttons, click the shutter and get some fuzzy, drunk-looking image. So, then I would push a few other buttons, click the shutter and get some dark shadowy-looking thing. I pushed buttons all evening and ended up with…ZERO decent pictures. How? How is that even possible? Is it the camera? Does the camera suck? Or do I suck?

My goal is to read the manual in the next couple of days. Maybe that will provide some enlightenment…
I’ll let you know how it goes.