"People think that all cameramen do is point the camera at things, but it's a lot more complicated than that." - Chris Elliott, Groundhog Day

It's not a long way down, but how could you not photograph your feet with your first camera? I mean, they're attached to you, so why not have a snapshot? His explaination? He wanted a picture to "check them if they weren't working good."

When you give a five year old a camera, one of their favorite subjects will be people’s heinies. It’s not that they fixate on the gluteus maximus, it’s just that’s how tall a five year old is, so they spend a lot of time looking at people's posteriors.

Let me give some background. For several years, we had a nice Sony 1.2 Mega pixel camera. Nice and good for snapshots of family and activities, but just not enough resolution for the outdoor subjects I wanted to take pictures of. Enter the new camera. It displaced the old camera like a Hollywood actress. For about a year now, the old camera has sat unused, like Jennifer Aniston (The Mrs. said that was too mean) Britney Spears' sense of decorum.

Yesterday The Boy began making noises that he’d like a camera. I took the duct tape off his mouth, and that was exactly what he'd been mumbling. For a bit, I thought he wanted a toy camera. It became clear during our discussion that what he wanted was a real camera.

The Mrs. suggested we buy a disposable for him. I demurred. Film and film processing plus camera cost is far more than I want to spend for twelve blurry prints shot over a two minute interval. Plus it involves a trip to the store. No, instead he can use the Sony camera we have sitting. Heck, it even has rechargeable batteries, so my skinflintdom would be nigh complete.


A good shot by The Boy. Our dog looks reflective, like he's thinking about how he shouldn't have dropped out of college and gone to Paris with his bimbo girlfriend who dumped him for a cigarette-smoking Frenchman named Louis. Or like he's thinking about licking himself.

I located the charger for the camera in the tangled mass of cables that sits in a drawer of my computer desk. If SkyNet™ (the folks who brought you the Terminator®) ever develops a spider, I imagine its nest would look just like my computer drawer.

Whereas waiting for the charger to put sweet, sweet electricity into the camera was not a problem for The Mrs. or me, I could sense The Boy’s impatience with the rate of charging. He sat and stared at it, as if by sheer willpower he could make it charge faster. As it is, we let the camera sit overnight. The first thing the next morning he was on the camera. I, however, was on the couch attempting to catch another ten minutes of shuteye. One of his first pictures was of me sleeping on the couch. The Mrs., upon seeing that, exclaimed, "A-ha! You've been caught!"

How do you respond to that? She had evidence, so I spun a tale of being tired after fighting off a gang of Mongolian Special Forces troops who were here to steal our green chili recipe. She nodded. I think she bought it.

He shot over a hundred pictures in a two hour period, which is 1/16 of the pictures that the camera has taken since we’ve owned it. We ended up keeping 58. His technique is essentially to run around with the camera in his hand. When he remembers he has the camera, he takes a picture of whatever he's looking at right then. I think that this is the way that Dick Cheney hunts, but I could be mistaken. I hate to be the camera-shot critic guy, but we didn’t bother to download the pictures that he took while jumping – the blurry mess might count as art and make him eligible for some sort of federal grant for artists, but I didn’t want to spend hard drive space unless he could con the taxpayers into buying me another hard drive first.

One thing that it did give me was insight into what the world looks like through the eyes of The Boy, which is an unexpected benefit. It's a simple world. But messy. And filled with grubby boy-things.


This one's called: "Laundry Basket With Funky Electronic Image Processing and Finger on Lens" and replaced the deleted "Mommy Getting Out of the Shower"

Some of the pictures were good, though. The picture of the Sun (on the post below this one) from his perspective (low to the ground) wouldn’t have occurred to me. Most, though, were just pictures of heinies.