I broke my digital camera on Memorial Day when I dropped it on my Aunt Mimi’s patio. It won’t extend the lens and keeps telling me I should take the lens cap off, but it’s already off. I’ve had the camera for over five years. If I had been buying film all that time, and taken as many pictures as I did, it would have cost lots more just for film than I spent for the camera. So, I couldn’t complain.
We were in Newton this past weekend for Arlene’s college reunion at Brandeis. One of her college suitemates, Jeannette, came up from southern New Jersey with her husband Rick for the reunion and stayed at our house on Friday and Saturday nights. We all went over to Brandeis for a class dinner on Friday. On Saturday morning Arlene and Jeannette went over mid-morning and Rick and I went to Newtonville Camera so I could get a new camera. I let them sell me a Nikon Coolpix L5. One of the things I like about it is that it has a special portrait mode which sets the flash to automatic red-eye reduction, the focus to face recognition focusing (so it figures out where there is a face, and focuses there!), and the depth of field to not much, so the rest of the picture has softer focus than the face. After taking the picture of my sweater sleeves, I immediately tried the portrait mode on Rick and Jeannette, with the following results. The reduced depth of field doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference, or it doesn’t show here. Maybe it’s more obvious if you look at the pictures full size.
