Tax Return Camera

I was saving for a new camera. The nikon Coolpix 960 was just not cutting it. I had promised myself a new camera as a reward for not loosing my mind in grad school. That had been put off for quite a while do to the expenses of moving and wedding planning.

You have your priorities. Work before pleasure.

If you want to make art, have your camera fight you every step of the way will inspire you to not make art. You want the image, not weird colors that no one understands (except nikon engineers). The 960 was definitely falling down on the job. It wouldn't turn on. It couldn't focus. It ate batteries. It was really slow. It worked surprisingly well for a 13 (14?) year old camera. But it felt like a relic when compared to everything else I had used, except of course, the Apple Quicktake.

Fortunately, I screwed up my tax return for the 3rd year in a row, and that somehow translated in the IRS giving me more money than I figured they owed me. I find this to be a prime example of the need for our tax-code to be re-written. It is so dense that the IRS has to tell us about the forms that we should have filled out, had we known they were there.

So, I left a pile of money at Adorama and purchased a Canon s95.


Holy Cow.

This camera wants to take pictures. Especially technically amazing pictures. It wants it very, very, very badly. I have never used a point and shoot that made camera control so quick and easy. It can handle low light decently. The controls are easy to get at, plentiful, and mostly self explanitory. The color rendition really nice. The (relatively!) large sensor gives some since of depth of field.... it's hard to find an excuse not to like this camera. It does feel a little cramped for shooting a lot of pictures (it's smaller than my wallet). But, I think it would save you from lugging an SLR on a hike where your goal was hiking, not photography.


I really like this one.

Time to go make art.