Must Get New Camera NOOOOOW!

I've just about had it up to here with my KAP camera. It's a Nikon Coolpix 5600. Great for size and weight, not too bad on optics and detector, but it's got some habits that drive me nuts.

In the default shooting mode the time between button press and shutter trip is on the order of five seconds with two seconds to save. To be safe I allow ten seconds between exposures to make sure I don't jam the camera. (THIS HAPPENS!)

In the higher speed shooting modes the camera likes to go to sleep after about five minutes. It doesn't power down, oh no, it goes to sleep. It's a halfway mode the camera goes into that you can wake it up from by lightly tapping the power button. Which of course I can't do when it's 300' up my kite line. GRRR! And no, this doesn't seem to be a function I can disable. It's a feature, not a bug.

No matter what mode I use it in it's prone to getting into some infinite loop in which it doesn't respond to anything at all. The only remedy is to remove its batteries and re-install them. That's what happened today, after about an hour and a half of trying to photograph black tipped reef sharks. Instead of the two hundred some-odd pictures I thought I'd taken, I had fourteen frames of blah, then nothing. So I swore silently to myself, re-launched, and got about fifty shots of light reflecting off water. No sharks, and I got a sunburn to boot.

So I'm extremely fed up. It's time for a change. I've been using Canon SLR cameras for almost thirteen years, and now have a Canon 20D that I love. Among other things you can leave it on and it'll go to sleep properly! Tap the shutter button and it wakes back up. (Hey, I have a servo for tapping the shutter button!) But I can't afford to put a 20D on a kite line. Not just yet, anyway.

A friend let me try his Canon A-series point and shoot, and I found the user interface very similar to the 20D. Different grip, of course, but the controls all looked familiar. A little poking around at the current offering of Canon cameras broung up the A650IS. It has a large detector (1/1.4" as opposed to 1/2.7" common on most digital P&S cameras), a decent wide focal length (35mm equivalent, same as the 5600), manual, aperture, and shutter priority modes, and controls really similar to the 20D. The image stabilization is secondary to me at this point because I don't think it's really been demonstrated to help with KAP, but I'm more than willing to give it a try. I also like that it has a bayonet collar for auxiliary attachments. This offers a much more solid attachment point for a lens shade than the one I made for the 5600, and is likely to be the first accessory I buy for the thing.

But at close to $350 I'll have to wait a while. So I won't bad mouth my 5600 too much just yet. It might get spiteful.

On another note I finally washed my Flowform 16 and the two fuzzy tails. They'd been getting increasingly gross from the occasional dip in salt water, landings in dirt and sand, etc. The final blow was a sudden rainstorm in town that doused my kite thoroughly (no KAP rig attached, thank goodness!) followed by a mud puddle landing. I ran them on delicate in our washing machine at home with about a teaspoon of 7th Generation HE detergent. They came out bright, clean, and fresh, with my center bridle line dangling loose. I just hope I got the length right when I re-attached it! It's too wet to find out today.

Tom