Meet Wendy's Camera

Here is Wendy's new favorite toy.  It is a Vivitar ViviCam 46 which we purchased for $19 at Wal-Mart.  This is not the camera to get to capture important family memories or for that special vacation, but if you want to get a camera to hand to someone under the age of 3 and tell them to just go for it, so far this seems to be a decent pick.  It takes triple-A batteries and requires an SD card, so the trip cost us a bit over $40 (Daddy went for the 4GB card and a big pack of batteries) but we figure the SD card would fit in our camera anyway in case the endeavor fails, and who doesn't need more batteries, right?

So, the Kodak camera is 12 megapixels with automatic flash and various photo settings.  This one has 4.1 megapixels, no flash, and no real bells and whistles to speak of.  Perfect!  Fewer buttons.  To get a little perspective, Daddy took a picture while Wendy was napping and wouldn't freak out that someone else was touching her camera.  This is the result:

So, not amazing quality, but not terrible either.  As a quick aside, this is a good time to introduce Brockett.  He is our first child, a nine-year-old half Jack Russell half Beagle all awesome dog.  If Wendy is anything like her mommy, this blog will end up featuring him heavily.  He is a pretty willing model, particularly when he is comfortably settled into his favorite sunbeam spot.

So, how did Wendy do with her new camera?  You be the judge!

Pictures Taken February 1-2, 2013:

This is but a small sample of the 73 pictures she snapped in the first two days of camera ownership, and I think there are some pretty cool ones in there.  We are kind of waiting for her to get less enamored with her new toy, but so far she is still having lots of fun with it.  Her first words when she gets up tend to be, "Where is my camera?" so I think the purchase so far is a success.  

--Mommy

Meet Wendy

This is Wendy.  Wendy is two and a half years old.  She likes the movie Tangled, dancing to rock music in tutus, ice cream, and running around like a crazyperson.  She dislikes admitting that she is tired or being forced to relinquish electronic devices.  She also has a very rare skin condition, Epidermolysis Bullosa, which causes her skin to blister easily due to friction.  Children with this skin condition are known as Butterfly Children because their skin is so fragile.  Wendy's subtype is not severe, and she does not let it slow her down.  There are wonderful blogs about EB out there, but this is not going to be one of them.  It is part of who Wendy is, but she is many other things as well.  This blog is about Wendy the Photographer.

About a week ago, Wendy was playing around in the computer room when she came across an old pre-Christmas K-Mart ad.  In that ad were a few things that Wendy decided she wanted.  The first was a Nintendo DS.  Mommy made it quite clear that was not happening for many years yet.  Then she focused in on some pink Hello Kitty cameras.  She said that she wanted a camera so she could take her own pictures.  This seemed a more reasonable request, so I told her I would ask Daddy about it and we would see.

Oftentimes, these I-wants come and go, but Wendy continued to ask if we had decided about the camera yet.  Daddy and I started looking around at toddler cameras to see if there was anything out there.  Basically all of the photo quality was worse than our crappy old cell phones and the only ones that did not apparently immediately break had games installed on them, and as stated, she was NOT getting a gaming system at age two.  So why not just a really cheap regular camera?  Well, with her skin and fingers, and you know, being two, could she handle the buttons?  I decided to find out.  In a brave or foolish gesture, I handed her my point and shoot Kodak camera my parents got me when she was born.  I wanted to see what she could do with it.  Here are the results:

Pictures Taken: January 31, 2013

So while the finer points of aiming, pointing, and keeping fingers away from the lens are still going to remain a work in progress, it seemed clear that Wendy could, at minimum, figure out the buttons.  Daddy and I decided to go on this photographic journey with Wendy.  We got her a cheap, bright purple camera and she hasn't put it down yet.  As she takes pictures, learns the mechanics of the camera, and figures this out, I will continue to post her pictures and her progress.  Should be fun!

--Mommy