Digital Camera

All of the pictures shown on this website were taken from a Canon PowerShot A40 Digital Camera.  I just picked it up a few days before I got started on the Layout phase.  With today's 10 megapixel cameras, its nothing now, but back in the day when 2 megapixel cameras were the top of the line, it was quite an amazing little camera.  I'm definitely not a photographer.   I'm not into messing with f-stops and aperture settings and exposure timing, etc.  I just like to be able to point and shoot.  My main reason for getting the camera was so I could quickly turn around pictures and get them onto the website within hours of completing a phase. 

I'm not quite there yet (more because of laziness rather than the camera), but the camera has served me quite well.

One nice little feature that comes with most digital cameras in the 2M pixel range and up now is a movie/video mode.  I'm quite amazed how many seconds of video you can actually take with even 64MB of compact flash.  Granted, its only 320x240 or 160x120 resolution, but its effective when I want to take quick and dirty little doo-dahs and don't want to haul out the klunky video camera.  I used the movie/mode during shotcrete and I took 10 second snippets in both resolutions.  If you go to the shotcrete page you will find the files there to download.  With the 320x240 resolution, the size of the resulting AVI file is less than 2MB.  Thats pretty reasonable even by today's standards.

I got it for $299.  I could have gotten it over the Internet for about $250, but with shipping costs and the cost of waiting, it wasn't worth it.  The day before the Layout guy came, I found the camera at an Office Max close to my house.  The thing that sold me was that they were giving a 64MB Compact Flash stick along FREE if you purchased the camera.  At that point, it was a no-brainer.  I didn't want to order it over the Internet and risk missing a whole phase of the pool building.