Lazy Days, New Toy

It’s a relaxing, do-dishes, read, tidy-house, do-nothing, two-night stay in Greenwood, Nebraska. The place is barely quarter full tonight, was packed to the gills yesterday. The park’s marquis reads “Welcome Rolling Turtles and Dept 56 Clubs”—both of which spent last night clustered around campfires and departed today.

I crunch through wide-bladed grass to the soybean field that edges the property. The Nebraska Raceway is a couple of fields away to the north; its announcer blares indistinguishably through the PA, and engines roar like chainsaws. Truck wheels drone on I-80 to the south. The sun is setting in silence to the west. A quiet RV park is to the east behind me.

Bugs fill the spaces in between with a whirr like electricity pulsing through wires, led by a rhythmic, one-second cycling of an almost metallic beep. It reminds me of aluminum zinging on metal fillings and horse halter buckles rubbed on pipe corrals. Then silence, absolute, as all the bugs stop at once, before the windup begins again for the next symphony.

A flying bug just dropped down the front of my camisole shirt. Ew. Out! Out! Whew, there it goes.

Aside from this bug’s visit, the highlight of my Greenwood stay has been driving to Best Buy at the outskirts of Lincoln to buy a new digital camera. Truly, this is a highlight because a “real” digital camera has been long overdue for me.

You may have noticed that a few of the latest pictures have been off-color to green or orange, that most indoor shots are yellowed, and that my subjects are rarely of anything that might require a flash, like good evening or backlit shots. Colors tend to get washed out, and high-contrast targets catch either the foreground or background, but not both. Even my Arches photos in Utah didn’t capture the glorious reds and oranges that stood against piercing blue skies.

All the photos to date have come from my all-in-one Pocket PC, Perry. It’s actually a Windows computer (Word, Excel, Outlook, etc.), global cell phone, video camera, voice recorder, Internet/email/bluetooth device, and 2 megapixel camera—all packed into a unit half the size of a cigarette pack. It’s great for phone calls, backup email access, and on-demand journaling.

But its camera component is, well, insufficient for the blog I like to write nowadays. It has no flash, poor zooming, only 2 megapixel resolution, and diminishing color quality that I can no longer compensate for. Plus it won’t hold important camera settings as defaults, which means it often runs out of memory while I tour, so every half hour I’m stopping to back up the latest photos to the storage card and clear the main memory.

I bought Perry in early 2006 for the Britain trip, and it is still great for its other purposes and as a quick-shot daylight camera. But now I carry two devices in my purse: little Perry and an Olympus digital camera that’s almost the same size.

Every time I buy new technology, it’s as if I’ve never bought it before, so much changes in three to five years. I spent a good two hours at Best Buy, looking over every model they had, comparing, testing, quizzing the workers (very knowledgeable), contemplating the necessity of certain options, trying to find that “just right” combo among many that were “too much” or “too little” in size, interface, capabilities, and price.

The one I settled on is the Olympus Stylus 9000—12 megapixels with a whopping 10x optical zoom in palm-sized unit. It has four settings of flash and the freedom of automatic, manual, and many useful predefined settings (even one called “Beauty” that produces a retouched duplicate of people photos—wow). Easy finger controls, easy to interpret user interface, and just the right amount of additional photographic power for the tech-head in me (color balance, exposure control, etc.). And it uses a 4GB (!) storage card that’s as small as my pinkie nail. Twenty years ago, 20MB of external hard drive space (that’s 20,000 bytes vs 4,000,000 bytes) was as big as a shoebox and cost nearly $800; the 4GB card I bought today was less than twenty bucks and so small I could swallow it.

Perry the Pocket PC.

My new Olympus.

So from here on out, the variety and quality of my travel photos will probably be a whole lot better. Hurrah!