New Camera

I'd been noticing a decline in my photo quality from my other camera & decided that it had served me well over the last 2.5 years. From it's first scouting trip to Puerto Vallarta for our wedding in June of 2006 to our Big Sur trip to our wedding & honeymoon in February of 2007 to tubing down the river in the fall of 2007 to baseball trips in 2007 and 2008 to running the marathon with me last year to underwater fun and river rafting in South America for our anniversary in 2008 to SCUBA diving this past summer. This camera has worked tirelessly for me & was with me everyday in my purse, and it's of course attended many concerts. I'll be keeping it around as a waterproof/weatherproof camera to use underwater, but I thought it was time to upgrade my technology.

I did lots of research and debating about what sort of new camera to get. There are some new fancy models of the Olympus Shock & Waterproof line, but their picture quality is just OK and I will keep my old camera for use near/under water. I really wanted something that took great photos, was ultracompact and had a great zoom lens. I settled on the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5A, which will be a big upgrade from my 3x to a 10x zoom- one of the best offered on a camera this size.



Especially after reading the very through review on Digital Photography Review and glowing reviews on Amazon. I have a dSLR if I wanted to do all the fancy manual setting and such, but I just wanted a great camera I could whip out and point-and-shot. I will be giving it a good first workout as it will be my main camera for the inauguration, because I can't bring myself to lug around my D-80 without a camera bag for 12 hours in the cold.

You can see both of my cameras here & that my Panasonic is a little longer and a little thicker. It's going to take me a while to learn all the new features, but I'm loving the super-zoom lens so far.

Being a total photography freak, I think we'll have all 3 cameras with us in DC for the inauguration. We'll take various ones on different days depending on what we are seeing, how long we'll have to carry it and what the weather looks like.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: I'm meeting up with lots of friends in DC today.