For The Journey Not just the destination…

Bill, our friend from Bloomington, IN, is currently in Charelston, SC with the Navy. He came down to visit us for the weekend. Thomas beat me to a write-up of this weekend, and since mine would be the very same, I’ll just hit the highlights and link to his entry.

We tried two new restaurants, attempted two geocaches, played two games, and overall had a fun weekend. We were able to introduce Bill to some of our local friends. I really miss getting groups together for dinner or boardgames, like we used to so frequently in B’ton. I took photos:

* Backyard Birds – Thomas let me play with his birding lens
* Caching with Bill

The best part of the weekend for me was waking up this morning to the smell of breakfast cooking. The house was filled with a smell that reminded me of Mama C’s house. Bill had made Thomas and I biscuits with sausage gravy for breakfast, and they were delicious!

This weekend and last night, I tested the Canon S2 IS digital camera. I tried to take the same shots with it and my Canon G3 to compare, and I have returned the S2 back to the store. It does not match what I’m looking for.

Here are the best of the sample photos I took – the last 5 were with my Canon G3, the rest were Canon S2 IS.

* Canon S2 IS vs. Canon G3.

And here’s the review I’m going to post to Amazon:

I currently have a Canon G3 that I love, but I’ve had it for a couple years now, and I’m interested in an upgrade. I use my camera mostly for macro nature photography and everyday around the house photos. Most of the time I use automatic settings and come out with decent results. I’ve been wanting a better telephoto lens for birding. This is what I was comparing the Canon S2 IS against when I took it out for a test drive this weekend. I will be returning the S2 – it wasn’t worth it as an upgrade to me.

There are a few design features that I did not like. The S2 uses the LCD to show what features are enabled. I prefer how the G3 has two seperate screens – one as a viewfinder and one for displaying settings. That way, if the LCD is closed, I can still see what settings I have selected. The eyepiece viewfinder is digital, not optical. When I’m zoomed in all the way, I will use it to track an animal, where I can see more of the scene, but the S2 eyepiece displays the same picture as the LCD, and when zoomed in all the way it was too blurry to see anything.

I loved the image stabilization and the telephoto lens. I was able to stand in my house and get decent photos of squirrels and birds in trees outside. I could get clear basketball players at dusk from a distance. The colors did not seem as rich as my other camera, but the image quality was just as good. The camera focuses quickly and the pictures are quick.

The macro lens is what I was very disappointed about. It’s true that you can get a photo with the lens directly on the object – I got a shot of the newspaper with the lens touching, but no animal or insect is going to let me get that close for a photo anyway. The part I disliked the most with the macro is that you cannot zoom in that mode. Usually I get as close as I can physically and then zoom in, but not with the S2.

Personally, I still want a camera that can do a telephoto zoom as well as this one, but not lose the macro capabilities I have with my current camera. Unfortunately, I don’t think there are any available right now that meet my needs, without me going to SLR.

The group of ladies I eat lunch with got into an interesting discussion today. We talked about defining who we are…who I am. Off the top of your head, how would you answer the following questions?

* Who are you?
* What do you do?

We realized that alot of us define who we are by our jobs, or our partners and families.

* “I’m a designer.”
* “I work for so and so..”
* “I’m married, and have two kids.”
* “I’m so and so’s wife.”

I think I focus enough on other activities that I enjoy outside of work to make sure that I don’t define who I am by my job. You can see it in my blog – I have enough to write about, though not always exciting, without mentioning work. I even have a description of who I am in the sidebar that doesn’t fall into the groupings above. But I know I’m guilty of grouping my partner together in who I am. That is obvious in my blog – I don’t think there’s a single entry that doesn’t mention him atleast once. And we’re not even married.

Well, it’s something to think about. We have our separate activities, but I do notice that I do group us together a lot. I’ve been bumming at the fact that we’ll be spending Christmas apart this year – him in Sweden, me in Texas – but maybe it will be a good chance for me to reconnect with who I am, separate from him.

(Edit: Thomas thinks that last sentence sounds like we’re breaking up – but that’s not what I meant.)

I finally finished my rooster kitchen curtains this weekend. They’re two tiered – roosters on the front and red with little yellow swirls just barely peeking through from the back. When Thomas got back in town, he helped me hang them up.

I was very excited and proud of them when I finished them, but now that they’re hung up, I wish I had made them a little longer so they had more floof. It’s that perfectionist side of me. Also, I am not sure I like how they look like three seperate curtains, rather than joining all together into one long wrap around curtain. I’ll wait a day or two and see if they start to feel more comfortable.

Here’s what the kitchen nook looked like without curtains. Please excuse the dirty windows.