"To see a world in a grain of sand...." --William Blake

I think my favorite plant in our backyard is our snail flower vine. Here are some pics of the snail flower, errr...at least my interpretation of them. I dig grain.

Diggin' on my Lumix camera

So I had my doubts when we bought the Panasonic Lumix F33 at Costco a couple weeks ago (when we thought Todd lost the old camera at Father/Son's campout; we found it, by the way). The name 'Panasonic' doesn't instill camera confidence in me, but the Leica lens mounted grandly on the front convinced me to give it a try. I'm glad I did. I really like this camera. It has no manual settings (a major bummer for me), but that's not really the purpose of a P&S (point & shoot) anyway. It does an okay job in macro mode (which is my favorite hobby--macro photography). The two pix of a parrot tulip (which my smoochable Todd got me for Mother's Day) below are about as close as the camera goes in macro--again, not too bad for a P&S. It also has an auto-bracketing function--LOVE THAT!






I LOVE this picture of Todd. We were weeding the front yard yesterday evening as the sun was just starting to go low. The Lumix has face detecting technology and an "Auto intelligence" mode which makes some pretty cool adjustments. It did a great job of keeping the light nice on Todd's face while the rest of him was in slight shadow. The wide angle lens (28 mm) gives you lots of options, too, with a nice zoom range.


And it took a nice portrait of Zane and Wuzzle. I like the color and the lens has nice contrast--not too harsh (like a Leica digital P&S I briefly owned several years ago--it was too contrasty for family snap shots, creating harsh lines).

Overall, I would recommend this camera to anyone looking for a new, inexpensive but great performing digital P&S. This was the least expensive camera in Costco at $199.95. It has a nice weight, attractive and sturdy body, beautiful Leica lens and fantastic functions. It's an 8.1 megapixel. **I checked out the Lumix 10 mp at Best Buy and the body was light-weight cheap plastic and didn't feel good in the hands. The 10 mp would have been nice, but I appreciate the better quality body of the Costco version, which also came with a case and photo viewing/editing software.