My Magic Camera

When I got my first digital camera, what I wanted more than anything else was the biggest zoom lens I could get.  This made for great pictures, however, the camera was a little unwieldly.  The jumbo lens made it heavy and too big to put in a handbag. Finding  a camera case was kind of problematic too. It's a good camera, it just isn't very convenient.  It's an Olympus, which means that it takes a different kind of memory storage card than all the other camera brands.

Then, my aunt bought a teeny weeny little camera that fit in a tiny little camera case in her purse. She uses it all the time. When she is trying to figure out what to wear, she takes pictures of herself in a few different outfits to decide.  When she was thinking of planting shrubs behind her fence, if she drove past a house that had did shrubs behind their fence well, she would snap a couple of pictures. I was jealous. I never used my camera and it was expensive, too.  I went in search of a little digital camera. I wouldn't mind a little less zoom, if I made better use of the camera.  I found a little Olympus and was won over. I based the decision on the memory cards and the card reader I already had.

A few years ago I went to spend four of the most amazing days in Rome visiting a cousin who was living there for a year (Hi Laurenn!).  I brought my little baby Olympus camera with me and was prepared to snap lots of pictures of art and architecture and culture and ruins, etc.  And, I made Rome my bitch!  Poor Laurenn, I got off that plane on Friday morning and I didn't stop until I got back on the plane Tuesday morning.  I really could have spent more time to see and do all that I'd like to there, but I made a pretty good dent in what Rome has to offer.  I owe a huge debt of thanks for that to my cousin. She was awesome, putting me up, cooking me dinner on my first night, since she figured the 6 hour time difference was going to knock me on my heiney.  

If you've used a digital camera or a cell phone camera, you know how hard it can be to see what you are taking pictures of in daylight.  I wound up spending a lot of time just pointing the camera and taking mystery pictures. The luxury of digital pictures is that you can delete all the bad ones, and sometimes bad pictures are good, even if they aren't what you were intending.  At the end of the day, we'd check out the results of my snapping and were shocked at how good a lot of the pictures were. We jokingly referred to it as the "magic camera."

Then we spent the day at the Vatican museum.  In the painting gallery, where you can take photos, but can not use a flash. In that gallery was a painting of Pan and a cherub. The painting was so dark and dingy that you could barely make it out.  It looked like a shadowy blob.  I took the picture, kind of as a joke to test out the magic camera and when I put the picture up on my computer was amazed to find the flashless photo was infinitely better, clearer and cleaner than the subject.  In fact, I think it's kind of an awesome painting.

Now, I've got to get back to Rome while I still know exactly how to get to the statue of Moses with the horns hidden in a little church in the vicinity of the Coliseum!