Saturday, January 8, 2011

A Picture's Worth $1000 Words



Okay, maybe not $1000, but at least half.  The Sony Alpha NEX-3 is just awesome. When my son was born we purchased a Canon DSLR.  I love to take photographs, but I hated the slow shutter speed of the pocket digital cameras {at the time}.  I knew that to really capture infants and small children, you need very fast response time.  So we splurged and and purchased the big bulky DSLR and I haven't regretted the purchase to this day.  

What I do long for is the size of the pocket cameras. When you have 2 kids and all the myriad things that come with them, the last thing you can afford to add to it is a big, bulky, fragile camera.  But I've done it, it's just not fun.  And I've missed a lot of photographic opportunities solely because I didn't have enough hands {or energy} to pull out my DSLR. 

This Christmas I was helping my mom pick a gift for my dad.  Now, he's still using a Cybershot from 2000.  Needless, to say, it's slooowww.  But as I looked for a new flicker, I stumbled across Smile Shutter from Sony.  It's on a number of their cameras, but I liked it best paired with the Sony Alpha NEX-3.  The Smile Shutter, when enabled, makes the camera take a picture when the subjects smile.  

This is incredibly useful when your subjects are little people who smile quickly and out of the blue. So I was eager to try it out on Christmas Day.  Unfortunately, that did not happen because Sony does not include memory sticks with their cameras {can we say cheap! geez}.  A few days later, after I received the memory stick from Amazon I took the Alpha NEX-3 out for a click.  The results were so wonderful! 

My seven month old is the most adorable little one ever {yes, I'm biased} and looks even more amazing when he smiles.  But it's difficult to catch him cracking one.  I'm always so busy trying to get him to smile, I often miss the smiles or catch them on the tail end.  But with the Smile Shutter set, I just held up the camera while I made funny noises and faces trying to get my little one to smile.  And just as advertised, as soon as he flashed his pearly 2 whites, the shutter snapped.  The picture is the best one I have and I can't wait to take many many more.
SMILE!
{not my little one, but he's still cute}