Winston Loves the Camera & Sadie is Starting To

Yet, Heidi doesn't go back outside after she gets back from her walk ... so I didn't get any pics of her. I will either have to start walking the hounds later for better camera light or take pictures of her earlier when she is outside.

Sadie may not like the iPhone because it's a phone. She has always ran away when I pointed the iPhone at her and likes to bother me the few times I am talking on the phone. When I point the new camera at her, she will face the camera when I call her name. Can you see a dog that size living in a 17' Casita trailer, with a 6'x14' living space? Plus two other long hounds.

Winston has always liked the camera, I'm not sure if there is anything he does not like ... he is just a very mellow basset hound.

He is actually sitting down in the top picture. Not a lot of clearance between the ground and the bottom of his stomach.

There are more weeds than grass in my yard, but it's green and cool once the sun goes down. He would lay there all night if I didn't call him to come inside. Due to Winston having some lower back problems that come with the basset breed, he doesn't play with Sadie as much as he use to but they are still pretty good pals.

Not quite the sunsets like the western states but you can tell it's fall by the way it looks, although the weather temps are not cool at sundown. It's continues to be great weather and not sure when it's going to end. Interesting.

That's it for today ... but I have a lot of ideas of where I want to explore around here. I'm going to try to take all three hounds with me and hopefully the more they ride the better adjusted they will become instead of acting like it's dinner time every time I stop the FJ.

A Camera Has Been Purchased

Maybe a surprise but this is usually my normal process about purchasing decisions ... want something, do some research, and buy it. It usually doesn't take longer than a week for a decision to be made. Why can't it be that simple when it comes to me buying an RV?

After I posted about my interest in buying a new camera, something different than my iPhone 5s and getting back into photography as a hobby, I had answers to my email questions, comments on my blog post, and a phone call from my long time friend of 45yrs. All of these people had taken or are taking great pictures currently. Almost all those that replied are using different model cameras. So I received the feedback I was looking for and by the time I made the 25 mile drive to Bloomington to Best Buy, a decision had been made.

Some of you may be asking "why Best Buy, you could have gotten a better deal". As it turned out, Best Buy was the best deal for me and I'll explain.

First of all to all that commented here on the blog and those that emailed me ... I looked and studied all of your suggestions. There were a lot of positives to sort through but I finally had to ask myself what my plans were for photography. Once I knew what I wanted to do and then built a little buffer into what I wanted, the decision was close to being made.

The camera searches included Amazon, Nikon, Canon, Best Buy, Adorama, Craig's List, eBay, some local camera shops and Walmart, even though I would never buy any electronics from Walmart.

I knew in the future I was going to be needing a zoom lens in the range of 200mm or more. I thought I'd have to buy that separately, so I looked at new and used lenses, recorded their prices. I also knew I wanted to buy more than just a camera body, I wanted at least one lens that came with the camera. When I added costs of buying things needed separately, it was always higher than what I expected to pay.

Tuesday night I called my old friend Ralph. We have known each other and keep in touch on a regular basis since we live an hour from each other. The reason I wanted to call him was to run some of my thoughts by him, Ralph as a teenager had Nikon 35mm camera equipment in the 1960's that he had used during his summer hikes all over the USA. I wasn't sure if he was still into photography. I assumed he might have done what most of us did and that was to buy a smaller, more convenient, automatic point and shoot camera.

Ralph is still using his Nikon D-90 with various lens. I won't go into our discussion but will say that toward the end of our conversation he agreed that I was buying the right camera for what I wanted to do.

I decided to buy the Nikon D3200.

As you see it came as a "Bundled Set" with a bag, a 18-55 and a 55-200 Nikkor lens. Basically it was everything I wanted. I found it at three different places online, all within $3 of each other.

Those places might surprise you.

1. Adorama
2. Best Buy
3. Walmart

Adorama and Walmart had the Nikon D3200 bundle for $546 and Best Buy had it for $549.

Now here is why I used Best buy. Besides being local, there was another big advantage, more than I expected. Since I had bought most, not all, of my Apple computers there I had a few dollars in awards not used that I could use to decrease the total price.

That's not all. In the past few weeks I looked at Gazelle Buy Back to see how much I could get for my two old iPhones, the 3gs and the 4, that have been sitting in my desk drawer after each phone upgrade. Also since Apple was no longer including the 1st generation iPad with their updates and synchronization with their computers and iPhones I had thought about trading that in for a newer model iPad. I remembered those amounts that Gazelle was going to give me for my two iPhones and iPad if I chose to use their buy back system. I did not think of checking what they were worth on Best Buys buy back program while I was on the computer at home. That mistake cost me making two trips to Bloomington.

So I am in the store ready to buy the camera and saw where they had deals on "trade ins", for the iPhone 6 or 6Plus. Long story short, Best Buy was giving more money for my two iPhones and iPad as a buy back than Gazelle was. Plus I could use that amount toward my purchase of the camera bundle and save even more. I didn't have the phones or iPad with me. I would have to drive back home, 25 miles away to pick them up if I were going to use my trade in dollars before I bought the camera.

So as I have the Nikon D3200 in my hands, I get an email from Mark over at Box Canyon Blog telling me he uses a small Canon Digital Elf 110 HS for his great photos while hiking. There was a Elf 135 right behind me. So I started thinking again about which camera to buy. Since I was going back home to get the phones and iPad to trade in before I made any purchase, I decided I could think more about the cameras on the drive home.

When all of the dust settled after using my award dollars on my account, the amount for my trade ins... My Nikon D3200 Bundle was bought for $335. I sprinted to my car and got out of town before they had the chance to change their minds. (j/k)

So this morning while the camera battery was charging and over coffee, I read the manual that came with it. I covered enough material to be able to use the camera. I lot of camera stuff came back to me from my past as I started to take some test pictures. Yes, I could see my hands were shaking just a little bit as I glanced through the viewer. It's great to have modern technology to fix that issue. So here are a few samples, nothing major, just some test photos. I didn't make any enhancement changes to the photos except crop a couple.

WARNING: On the photo of Sadie below you might want to scroll past it to the next picture of Winston, as it will be gross to some people. Otherwise if you choose to look at the next picture of Sadie you will see one of the highlights of owning a Bloodhound ... you might want to duck or turn away if she starts shaking her head. That isn't a white string you are seeing ... that is good old fashion bloodhound drool, stuck to the side of her lip.

What's wrong? she asks

Winston on the other hand has just returned from the daily walk and a little aerobic exercise. He must have been feeling good today because at times he did some trotting through the field. Usually its a very slow walk with him.

After the walk Heidi refused to come back outside for the photo shoot ... so nothing of her on this post. She is stubborn and I am stubborn.

The next shot is one of the older trees still standing in my yard. Someone told me it was a mahogany tree, I'm not sure ... but it's been there a really long time.

I "know just enough to be dangerous" with the camera, I like the clarity of the test pictures I took, something I was wanting even after cropping a couple of them. I ended the day with a short mountain bike ride to town a couple of miles away, about 4 miles round trip I guess. Combine that with mowing the yard today I should be able to sleep hopefully before midnight instead of 3am - 4am. I have decided these past few days as I have tried to decrease my computer time, that my days are going to be spent outside when there's good weather. I have decided to keep my computer time after 6pm. I cannot waste good weather, sitting in front of a computer all day.

For all of those people that contacted me with answers to my camera questions ... thank you.

Cameras

A few months ago on my way to recycling, which our center is located out in the middle of some corn fields, I passed a field of horses. It was a great opportunity to take a neat photograph but all I had with me was my iPhone 5s, I had no way to zoom in on the horses themselves. I took a couple of photos, one of them when they took off running but I was too far away. That was when I had a short mental bolt of wanting a different camera.

Sometime last month I was going through some older boxes of stuff when I had a sudden urge to downsize a little more. I found an old Kodak 8x11.5" box I had forgot I had, full of photographs I had taken close to 30 years ago with my Nikon (can't remember the model) and 70-200mm zoom lens. Some of those were black and white 8x10's, some where 5x8's in color.

A few of the photographs I took as a series on the beach in Hawaii as the sun was setting, not knowing my zoom lens was picking up a kyaker moving in front of the sun. What stood out to me was how sharp they were, even after 25-30 years old. Of course most of my photos were on 35mm slides. There must have been 1,000's of them, too many to look through and the thought of scanning them was overwhelming. I glanced through a lot of them, holding them up to the light and instantly going back in time and could almost feel like I was there.

Once again ... quality was sharp and clear.

In the mid-90's I sold all of my lenses, filters, the bag, tripod and camera body to a neighbor in high school wanting to pursue photography. I am not sure why I decided to sell that stuff, except a few years prior to that for some reason I had stopped using the equipment completely. I may have started taking photos with a smaller camera with a built-in zoom lens. I don't remember the name or model of that camera, but I do have a few photos from that time period.

Maybe the convenience of not carrying a bag of equipment with me? Maybe it was having just one camera and a multiple size lens that made me change my direction in photography? I don't know but I do remember after 1994 I started taking photos a lot less. Hardly at all. My bag of equipment sat in the closet never used until I sold it.

Last month I kept going back to those older photos and looking at how sharp they were. Then I would look at all my digital photos on my blog and in iPhoto on my iMac, trying to compare the difference. I thought my iPhone took pretty good photographs but one thing I noticed was when I would crop the photo and it would zoom into a closer view, the sharpness disappeared. You can see that in yesterday's post with Heidi at the top of the page. The other two photos were not cropped but for some reason were not as sharp as normal. Could it have been my hands, the light ... don't know.

When I mentioned I was looking at different camera equipment on my blog, a few made comments, a couple answered my questions by replying in emails and other's I found out what kind of camera they were using from their websites. All of them have great photography of their travels posted on their blogs. All of them were high quality and reminded me of my older photos that I shot with my 35mm camera years ago.

I knew then I wanted a different camera than my iPhone and the palm sized Nikon Coolpix 3100. I had bought the smaller camera in 2005 to take photos of items I was selling on eBay and my other websites. I've rarely been able to take good photos with that camera without using the tripod ... too small to hold steady.

So the past few weeks I've been spending more time looking at different cameras online, reading suggestions as I get them and just like my rv decisions ... hadn't come up with one.  Still I am much closer today on what to buy than I was a few days ago.

I've looked through all the specs, customer reviews, and even wrote down a list of camera models and lenses used by people that had commented, emailed or blogs I follow. NO ... I have not put that information into a spreadsheet like I have done on everything else, so I am pretty proud of myself that my camera analysis has not gone to that depth.

I was close to buying a Nikon D3200 last week. Since it was an older model, it was on sale. It came with the bag, battery, charger, strap and an 18-55mm lens. I didn't buy it, I wanted to research some more.

Albireo uses a Nikon D3300 and is considering moving up to a heavier, larger camera, the Nikon D810. That is some great equipment but might be more camera than what I am looking for. I don't know how far I want to take this reborn hobby, so I am almost starting over with a camera that a beginner would buy .. maybe 'intermediate' would be a more accurate level.

Al over at The Bayfield Bunch takes fantastic photographs daily. That is his hobby and although he claims he is not a professional photographer, the quality of his photos and the way they are taken are every bit professional. He has different cameras with different size lenses mounted for different shots. They range from a Nikon D3100, a Nikon D-90 and his older camera for backup, a Nikon D-40. He has a Canon SX210iS on his belt at times for the unexpected shot and a Canon A730iS near his chair inside to shoot the Phebe's. I do those kind of inside shots with my iPhone 5s, although Sadie is not a fan of being a photo model.

Chinle at Spotted Dog Ranch takes her landscape photographs of her travels with a Canon EOS Rebel T1i. A lot of her photos are using a larger zoom lens, one that I would need. I would have to buy the new version, a T3i if I went that route, unless I could find a used T1i on Amazon or Craig's list. Yet, there is just something about buying used equipment from those two sites that I don't like. I would buy used equipment from a 'old school' camera store or a friend though. From her photographs from Canada this past summer, I see that I would need 200mm or 300mm zoom capability for what I want to shoot.

Gary Ramsey has some fantastic photography at Travel Small With Ramsey. He uses a Sony NEX 5n. Those cameras are a little out of my price range, although the price for a used Sony NEX 5n is reasonable on Amazon, but you know how I feel about buying used equipment.

Basically I had been looking at different cameras that had interchangeable lenses. I was favoring the Nikon D3200 due to the customer reviews, the price and it was within a short distance from my house. I haven't bought it because I didn't know if I wanted to go back to carrying one camera and then a bag with different sized lenses. I had done that before many years ago when cameras that had multiple range lenses built into the camera were not available.

I kept reading and looking.

Then yesterday I get a comment on my blog post from Lloyd over at Enjoy The Journey. His older blog name was Wanderin Lloyd for those that follow blogs. Either way his photography is also fantastic with different cameras used over his 13 years of traveling. You will see in his comment yesterday that he uses a Canon SX40 for his trips to zoos, museums, etc and uses a Canon SX700 30x lens when hiking.

Those two cameras kind of hit home with me. Great photographs, great consumer reviews and I noticed all the photos taken from a distance were sharp. Just like the cameras I mentioned above but these had just one built in lens with a wide range of different distance. Was the Canon SX40 the camera I had been looking for?

I spent a lot of time last night looking at those types of Canon and Nikon cameras. I am thinking that might be the type of camera I need. 

What I want is one camera, ability to shoot macro shots, landscape, shots of my hounds even in "action", zooming in on the eagle that shows up in back on rare occasions. Then at times I'd like to zoom in on the 10-15 deer that surprise us at times just in back of the house. I also wanted to be able to catch action shots that requires high speed, at sport events, especially when I go to the Indy 500 to watch practice or the times I am sitting on row 53 at a football game wanting to take a shot down at the line of scrimmage or sidelines.

After reading about the Canon SX40 and SX50, I am beginning to think that is the camera I've been looking for. I would have to buy the SX40 on Amazon, everyone locally is selling only the SX50 model with the SX60 coming out in October.

So I will let those thoughts brew for a while, maybe a day, maybe hours ... before I decide what to buy. The Nikon 3100, 3200 and 3300 are available locally as well as the Canon SX50.

In the meantime, the hounds will continue to "sleep on it" before the decision is made.

Not a Lot To Blog About

One thing that has changed since I retired in April, the hounds get to go outside a lot more than when I was working. They also seem to like to go outside at the same times day and night. Just recently Heidi has been going outside every time the other two go outside and that's a good thing. Just this past summer she rarely got off of her dog bed on the floor and usually that was just to move to the couch.

But she is evidently feeling better now because not only does she go outside even for short trips, she is barking at 4pm every day to be fed.

It may take some coaxing to get her to get off the couch and go on the daily walk but once she starts the walk, she insists that she be the leader of the walk and will do anything to keep in front of Sadie to maintain the lead.

Little does she know that Sadie could care less who leads. Sadie is only conscious of what scent is in front of her nose and yesterday it was good I had her on a leash, the deer scents were stronger than normal.

Winston on the other hand is getting older and consequently is needing to go out more times than this time last year. I can tell that his aging process seems to have increased this past year and in a way that is a sad thing.

He will also put his nose to the ground as soon as he steps outside. He is stubborn, will not listen if a scent has him busy and is slow in everything he does. He is on his own clock and will not move faster no matter how much I voice commands.

In this picture around noon today he is enjoying a cool 65°. His favorite position is laying on the concrete in the sun and will spend hours sleeping, at times so long that I forget that he is outside.

Sadie have has never liked having her picture taken. I was able to when she was just a few months old, but after that she would turn her head or take off running. She definitely does not like the camera.

In this case I took eight different photos trying to catch her looking at me and every time at the last split second she would turn her head.

She might not like cameras but she LOVES outdoors. She loves going outside, will stay out for a while or there will be times that she will want to come back inside two minutes after wanting to go outside. She never barks but will just stand still until I come outside to find her.

She will even sit sometimes in the field not moving, thinking she is stuck or her rope is tangled up. The funny thing is, she is not on the rope that is anchored. The one time she was attacked by the neighbor's dog, she just sat down and didn't move while the other dog was moving around her in circles barking.

All of these photos were taken today around noon with an iPhone 5S.

It's another beautiful day here in the 'tropics' of southern Indiana. It was all weekend actually and it is the norm for this time of year, yet it's strange seeing all the different kinds of weather hitting other parts of the USA, the fires in California, flooding in Arizona and tornadoes yesterday in Michigan. Still very nice here and one of the reasons I hardly have the urge to travel in the fall seasons in the Midwest. Plus it's football season.

Saturday was the normal college football marathon. What can I say, I'm addicted to that sport even though there are still things outside the game I don't like about it. I am hesitant to say what I don't like about the current game because it also spreads into the NFL, and society in general. It would take too long to type and discuss all the different aspects of some sad situations and wold only lead to more discussions on subjects I am tired about hearing in the news.

I'll talk about the games only and not the news outside the games.

My local team (IU) had a major upset at Missouri Saturday. They have a little split personality in them the past couple of years, meaning they can play great one weekend and next weekend they might look like they have never played the game. I'll take the win on Saturday though. Those type of wins are very very rare in football.

I only have one tv but flip back and forth to different games during commercials. I also have my remote set up to a set of sports channels on DirecTv. It's amazing how many games are televised at one time. I don't want to see all of the games but a lot of times there are a couple of games going on at the same time, so I'll record one and then watch it later IF it turns out to be a good game. My Saturday viewing starts at noon eastern time and ends after the late Pac12 game usually around 1:30am Sunday morning. I'm a night person, so there is not a problem with the late finish time.

Sunday I watched only a couple of NFL games. The local Colts games and then a Super Bowl rematch where Denver was in Seattle, a game that went into overtime. Great game to watch.

Some might be asking what do the hounds do during all of these football games? They sleep most of the time which is their normal daily activity. Throughout the day they will have me take them outside, more trips during the day since I am retired. We can usually fit those requests to go outside during commercials and we still do the daily walk either at game halftimes or between games.

Their daily routine is not changed just because I am watching football. It's good they have the room to spread out during the day, each hitting their favorite sleeping spots and those spots do change during the day. That is one thing I think about deciding whether to buy a trailer or not ... the available room. The interesting thing is their sleeping spots are the same every day and change by what time of day it is.

Heidi is feeling much better. She is actually going outside every time the other two hounds go out, where she wasn't during the summer. She hardly got off of her dog bed during the summer, only getting up to move to the couch to continue her sleeping marathons. She takes her time deciding whether to go on the daily walk but then will insist she leads the way once the walk starts.

With all the news about Apple's release of the iPhone 6 and the OS upgrade to 8.0, I am seeing today in the blogs I follow that 8.0 seems to be too frustrating so they are showing people how they can revert back to OS 7.2. I usually wait before upgrading operating systems on my phone or computer and I think I'll still follow that until the bugs are worked out. It's tempting but I'm sticking with the 5s I bought in June. I remember when I decided to renew my contract and upgrade my phone, I had decided not to wait for the iPhone 6. I wasn't sure I would like the size of it.

Really, I have no desire to be carrying a small tablet all the time when I am out and about. In fact I have been tempted recently to selling my 1st generation iPad, my iPhone 4 and my new iPhone 5s ... then going to a cheap flip phone to use for emergencies and making the few calls I make every month. When I thought about that, the only thing I could gain by selling the 5s, is part of the cost of the phone. I would still have to have the same monthly plan with Verizon, so I would not be saving anything there. I might as well keep the 5s.

Reading Rick's blog this morning, I started thinking if I should go back to a Google+ account. Unlimited storage for iPhone photographs is a pretty good deal. I have plenty of room on my iMac, so storage is not an issue for photographs, same with my 16Gb iPhone. I have 1,000's of photos on my iPhone and have barely used the amount of storage available. I still remember the reasons I stopped my Google+ account before and still feel the same way about it.

Rick did bring up an interesting point when he was talking about cameras. He said with digital photography and posting photos on blogs, it really didn't make a difference if those blog photos were taken by an iPhone or a bigger digital camera. Recently I've been thinking of buying a bigger digital camera to get back into photography as a hobby. It's been almost 20 years since I had a larger camera and interchangeable lenses. The only other camera I have besides my iPhone is a Nikon CoolPix 3100, that I bought years ago for my online sales business.

Many times I would have to use a tripod with that camera because I was not able to hold the camera still enough when I used two hands. Would it be that way if I were to buy a larger Nikon? I think a larger camera would be easier to hold and less chance of blurred photos that the CoolPix has at times.

That's about it ... nothing really going on ... and I apologize for the lack of excitement in this post. It's just part of the laid back lifestyle outside a small rural town. I'm spending less time on the computer recently, looking and reading about different cameras, and on occasion trailers and camping equipment. I have thought more about traveling this winter. I still don't see traveling is possible with my three hounds and two hands.