Photography

Nine months ago (yikes!), I was an idiot and left my camera at a bus stop on my way to work. Ever since then, I’ve been using a camera that my friend Rick very kindly let me borrow until I could afford a new camera of my own. Well, it looks like that day may be coming pretty soon — I’m getting a new camera for free!

My current job has me staffing a facilities management (FM) site — running a small on-site copy facility for a company’s local offices. There’s been an ongoing contest for the past few months among all the various FM sites that we run for this company (they operate in a number of states) for the most number of positive customer comments. Each FM site was to send in any customer comments they received, good and bad, and the site with the best ratio of positive comments to income (to keep smaller single-person sites like mine on an even keel with larger, busier facilities elsewhere) wins.

Well, I got a call from our local account manager this morning letting me know that we won! Not only did we win, but it was a virtual shutout: our site got somewhere around 120 positive comments (no word on how many negative comments there were, but I know I haven’t seen any), and from what she told me, all the other sites got zero. Apparently, for some reason, while we were passing out comment cards and following up with customers to make sure their jobs were done correctly and on time, the rest of the sites just didn’t bother to participate in the contest. Seems more than a little bizarre to me, but I’m hardly going to complain!

So next Wednesday, I’ll be heading out to have a little celebration after work at one of the local happy hours with my manager and our account manager, and at some point in the near future, I’ll get my prize — a new digital camera!

Of course, seeing as how I’m a greedy little self-centered sod who’s never satisfied with anything, I’m wondering if I can manage to do myself just a little bit better. According to the flyer announcing the contest from a few months ago, the camera in question is a Nikon Coolpix 3200. Now, it doesn’t look like a bad camera, but is has gotten a few troubling user reviews on DPReview. Also, it apparently comes without a memory card, and the memory cards it uses are SD/MMC, while I have a couple of CompactFlash cards (including one 256Mb) here that I’d hate to have to replace with something else.

What I’m wondering is if there are any local business (Best Buy or something similar) that will take a receipt-less “return” of an un-opened box — this is the Christmas present season, after all — in exchange for a sale on a slightly better camera in the same rough price range (letting me pay the difference if the target camera is slightly more expensive). Since the current retail for the Coolpix 3200 is in the \$200 range, I figure I could get one of the mid-range Canon Powershot series for just a fairly minor out-of-pocket cost — if there’s a place that will let me do this, of course.

Any ideas? If not, I’m certainly not going to turn my nose up at being handed a free camera, even if it’s not everything I might want! No matter what, it’ll be nice to have a camera of my own again.

“See My Ships” by Violent Femmes from the album 3 (1989, 3:17).

This is one of my favorite old family photos. Probably just a proof that was passed on during the selection process, it always makes me laugh when I see it.

Mom’s yawning, I’m looking off to the side and could drool any moment, Kevin just looks confused, and dad’s the only one to be paying any attention to the photographer.

I’m guessing at the date of the photo (Kev looks around one-ish, I could be around four-ish), but I think I’m close.

“Time” by Pink Floyd from the album Dark Side of the Moon, The (1973, 7:05).

Another 360° panoramic photograph from my recent vacation. This time, I’m standing on one end of a pedestrian overpass on Muldoon road, just beyond the curve where Muldoon becomes Tudor (the curve can be seen on the extreme left and right of the image).

My parents’ house, where I lived from mid-3^rd^ grade until I moved out when I was 18, is hidden beyond the trees just to the left of the tree in the foreground towards the right side of the image. The Chugach mountains rise just beyond our housing area, giving it its name of Chugach Foothills. The houses in the mid-ground in front of the mountains went up during one of the housing development booms while I was in high school. Mostly obscured by the tree on the right of the image is a large park, often used for summertime soccer games.

Were you to follow Muldoon Road to the far northern end (a few miles beyond where it disappears in this photo), you’d end up at my alma matter, Bartlett High School. While I moved to Seattle just a few months before my 10-year reunion and didn’t go, my friend Royce was there (while he graduated in ’90, his girlfriend Stephanie was in my graduating class) and snagged me a Class of 1991 10-year reunion T-shirt which he gave me while I was visiting.

As with the Lake Spenard photo, there is a QTVR photo in the extended entry for this post (I do it this way so that modem users like my parents don’t have to download the 2 MB QTVR movie when they load the main page).

One of the panoramic shots I took while on vacation in Anchorage &dmash; Spenard Lake, which together with Lake Hood makes up the single busiest seaplane airport in the world (over 90,000 operations in 1994).

Since this is a full 360° panorama, you can see the same seaplane at the far left and right of the image. The mountain range in the background is the Chugach Mountains, which had just been hit with termination dust earlier in the week (for you lower-48’ers, ‘termination dust’ is the snowfall on the peaks of the mountains — its appearance marks the end of summertime in Anchorage). Towards the right of the picture are three cars: my mom’s van, which I was driving that day; James’ Geo something-or-other (which will soon have the custom license plate “NUPRIN” — “Little, yellow, different”), and Mercedes’ car. Just behind the workshack is a yellow apartment building, you can just see the balcony of Marc and Laura’s apartment.

For a more “like you’re really there” experience, click on through to the extended entry, where I’ve posted a Quicktime VR version of this image (assuming this works, I’ve not yet tried uploading Quicktime files via ecto).