OK I was wrong; time to get a new DSLR

I thought that ditching the DSLR was in my best interests. At the time, it seemed a legit concept: I wasn’t shooting as many pictures because I was unwilling to actually whip it out to take the shot.

Yes, again, I whip it. I whip it good.

Anyway, it came upon me about a month ago, the nagging feeling that the P&S camera thingy wasn’t working out so well for me. It was when we had gone on the Lady Bird Johnson Trail, shortly after we had gotten down the mountain after finishing the trail. We sidelined ourselves along the river to eat and let the puppies play, and wouldn’t you know it, a couple of Bald Eagles had made home in a dead tree up the river and were flying about. Try as I might, the best I could do was a lump in the distant background of trees, and it honestly looks more like digital camera noise than a Bald Eagle :-(

The feeling was back a couple of days ago, when was out with my new boy-friend hiking the newly-established Dolason Trail (which is actually just up the hill from Lady Bird Johnson to begin with). I didn’t take much in the way of pictures to begin with, but the ones I took all mostly sucked. The panoramas were not in focus anywhere in particular, the colors were off (and since it’s jpeg you can’t get them back with white-balance adjustments), and when I tried to get in close to some deer in the distance, there was just no way I could get them in my sights. Fully zoomed-in, the best I could muster was about exactly what I could see to begin with. And manual magnification only resulted in blurry, purply-blue blobs.

And have I mentioned my recent spat of P&S camera issues?

So it would appear that what I’m going to most likely be doing is: getting a low-grade DSLR – I’m not a professional anyway – and probably doing a video camera along the lines of the Flip Mino HD. This way, I will have the BETTER of both worlds.

That is, if I don’t change my mind. Which I have a habit of doing. Because honestly, that’s still some serious coinage, and I wonder if I wouldn’t rather have this or that instead, and I don’t really take that many photos to begin with any longer. It’s just that I’m a perfectionist. Can I justify the extra cash just to satiate my lust for “a little bit more”?

Sort of, dammit. That’s why it’s all on my wish list. Because I want I want I want. And maybe someday I’ll have.