New toy

I have been trying to get a new camera for the past few weeks. I mean how hard should it be?

The old Nikon Coolpix which has been a great camera has been getting a little... unreliable. Among other things, over the past year it has increasingly not been doing a great job of resolving reds. This is something of a nuisance when I am taking pictures in the garden. Last year, a lot of the pictures I took of poppies were blobs of red with black centers.

So, after being pretty responsible with most of my tax return and trying to get current on some bills, I had a few bucks to spare.

I decided to move up the food chain a bit with the point and shoot and get something with a decent zoom, so I could get better pictures of some of the birds that visit my garden and maybe catch the occasional rabbit or other cute critter on film, or jpeg, or whatever we are calling the medium.

Sounds easy enough. Go on line order the thing and be done with it.

Not quite.

I had decided on a Lumix. I was torn between the 12X and the 18X zoom and saw a refurbished 18X zoom for about the same price as the 12X. So, I ordered it. I waited a week before I called up Amazon to see what was what. They were no help and couldn't tell me when I could expect to receive the thing, so I canceled the order and decided to try my luck with an outfit called 6th Ave. Camera.

What a mistake.

I put in my order and waited 2 days before I sent an email off to them to see why I hadn't received my shipping confirmation. I got a vague email back from them, saying that they didn't have the camera in the warehouse and were waiting for one to be transfered from one of their retail stores.

The long weekend came and went and still no word, so I called to see what was up, since it had been a full week and I had payed using my debit card. They now had my money and I had no camera. I was helped, if you can call it that, by a young woman who told me, "Oh, there must be a problem with the website. They say we have black body cameras in stock, and we only have the silver ones."

I told her that a silver one would do fine, but that since I had been waiting a week, I wanted the camera overnighted. I was informed that she couldn't do that, but that she would expedite the shipping and I would have the camera in a couple of days.

By the next morning I had still not received a shipping confirmation. I had had about enough, so I called them up to see what was going on. I was informed in a very offhand manner that "The order doesn't seem to have left the warehouse." I said, cancel the order. Which she did without so much as a question or a protest. I guess they don't need the business.

I then surfed over to Amazon, shelled out for overnight shipping and now have my new camera.

It's pretty cool. I has all sorts of functions that I still have to figure out and it takes good pictures.

So, here are a few shots I took last night and today. Thanks to B. and M. for the pictures at the office.