My father's been giving us some of the most precious things he could give us: wonderful old photos of our family. He's got boxes of photos and I think it's been a pleasure for him to stick them in albums now that there's not a lot he can do. He took lots of pictures. I remember standing there smiling in front of the blooming azaleas while he messed with the light meter and then shot the photo with a dual-lens Leica. The image he saw on the camera was upside down -- don't know how he managed to capture anything. But the pictures are good. And though there are piles and piles of them, they only capture a portion of life. I took this not especially good shot three years ago. It's of my parents and Lily at the pool. My father could still take care of my mother then, even with her Alzheimer's. Now she's bedridden and he's (supposed to be) in a wheelchair, with oxygen. It didn't take long to go from this stage to where they are.
Christmas is coming. Take lots of pictures. Is there anything more precious?
I tried to follow in my father's footsteps by taking lots of pictures of Lily, but I was handicapped by my camera. Actually, my camera, a Nikon 2020, was probably all right, but I couldn't afford a Nikon flash so half of her baby pictures aren't properly lit. Some even have a black bar across them. Things have gotten a lot better since I've gone digital.
I've got a Canon Elph that's great because it's small and smarter than I am. I love being able to take it with me places with ease, just in case I remember to take a picture. Unfortunately, like most little cameras, it's slow. Which means I take a lot of photos that show what happened seconds after the action. I can't tell you how many pictures I have of Lily jumping her pony, but there's no pony over the jump -- just a tail exiting the picture. Kind of like Breugel's Fall of Icarus where all you see is a foot going into the water. I can use multiple shot mode, but that doesn't give me the precision I'd like for snapping the shot NOW. It's more like a cartoon of scenes in motion. Sometimes I get the shot. Sometimes I don't. 
We're looking at other cameras now. Paul has his eye on a SLR Nikon D40 that we're hoping will do a better job with action shots. Nikon camerasThe catch is, you have to remember to bring it and use it.
By the time he decides, there'll probably be even better choices out there. And then we'll need one of those digital photo frames that's like an on-going slide show.This is a paid post, but every word is true.
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