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Twenty-five years ago, if you had asked me about my favorite hobby, I would have told you it was photography.  I had a couple of mid-level SLR cameras, enough lenses to look foolish, and a huge bag to carry it all around in.  A dabbled in lighting, did a few paying gigs, and generally annoyed my wife with my obsession.  By 1999 or early 2000, most of my equipment was getting pretty dated and tattered (most of it was second or third-hand anyway), so I decided to sell everything I owned and buy one new nice SLR.  Well, I sold the stuff, but never could decide which new camera to buy.  We went to Hawaii for our 20th anniversary that summer, so before we went, we bought a small point and shoot 35 mm camera to take with us.  At that point, digital cameras were pretty rare, so one of those newfangled gadgets wasn’t on my radar yet, but I was hooked on that little camera.  No bulky camera bag.  It fit in my pocket, and most of all, you could whip it out and snap away without all the fuss and muss of my old SLR’s.

We bought our first digital camera in the fall of 2002.  It was a fairly bulky affair, and if I recall, it was a Pentax.  It served us well until I left it in a cab in Mexico on our 25th anniversary in 2005.  That was not a good day.  It had a weeks worth of photos on it, and Pam wasn’t happy.  I’ve still not gotten past that little OOPS!  We had a wedding to attend about a week later, so we rushed out and bought another Pentax very much like the first (only smaller and sleeker) as soon as we got home.

In January of 2007 , we had a massive ice storm here in Springfield so I ended up working a lot of overtime.  By that time, both Pam and I were experiencing the universal truth that smaller things kept getting smaller, and we were both having trouble dealing with the small screen on our Pentax.  I took some of my overtime money and paid a what seemed like a fortune for a nice little Sony with a 3-inch screen so we could see it better.  The Sony had the distinction of being even smaller and easier to deal with.

For Thanksgiving 2008, Pam and I ran away from home, and to the dismay of our grown children, left them alone to fend for themselves for the holiday while we went on a cruise.  The second day out, I jumped into a hot tub with our camera in my pocket.  Yep…me, cameras, and vacations just don’t seem to get along.  We went down to the ship’s store and paid an outlandish price for another Sony camera in the hopes that the pics on the memory stick could be salvaged.  Luckily, they were fine, so at least I was spared the wrath that I had incurred three years earlier.

That little Sony is the one I’ve carried on nearly a daily basis since.  I very rarely climb on my bike without stuffing it in my jersey pocket in hopes of snagging a decent picture for this blog.  Unfortunately, it’s showing it’s age pretty badly now.  The flash is so inconsistently useless that it might as well not be there.  The zoom grinds it’s way in and out, and it takes forever to come on these days.  I think it’s been sweated on too much, and you can usually see dark circles on the pics from what I think is mildew growing  inside the lense.  You can easily see them on the picture below.

Well, to make a long story short, we’re planning to go play in the snow next month and I decided it might be nice to have a new camera to take with us.  My first insinct was to go find something reasonably priced that I wouldn’t mind hauling around in the pocket of my jersey and sweating on.  You know, something in the $90-$120 range. I casually mentioned it to Pam and promptly got the response, “I know exactly what you need!  I saw it in your Bicycling magazine!”.

Now, I don’t know about yours, but my sweet wife has expensive taste.  It’s so bad that every time we go for ice cream, I can predict exactly what she’s gonna order by browsing for the most expensive item on the menu!  When she said that, I cringed….then thought about her logic for a while and decided to just bite the bullet and do it.

My new Nikon CoolPix AW100 arrived today.  It’s a “ruggedized” camera that should stand up better to the abuse I dish 0ut.  I’m not keen on the built-in GPS, and have never done much with video, so in a lot of ways I feel like I paid for some bells and whistles that will remain silent, but I’m anxious to give it a try.  You’ll see some of it’s pictures on here in the next few days!

Now, if I can just keep from leaving it in a cab……

God bless…

TW

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This entry was posted on January 25, 2012 at 5:00 pm and is filed under bicycle, Bike Commute, Cycling, Fitness. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: bicycle, Bike Commute, camera, Cycling, Fitness, Nikon CooxPix AW100, vacation

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