This hawk choose our backyard to have its lunch. There was not much left of it by the time I snapped this picture but he was treating himself to some little bird. The hawk was quite a sight and I was glad it stayed long enough for me to snap a couple of photos. Unfortunately I only got a handful because my camera crashed. Really. First the auto-focus stopped working then it just shut down. I thought it was the batteries, but new batteries were no help. It would turn on for a moment and then shut down again. A few hours later I tried it again and it worked fine. I'd left the batteries out for a bit and it seemed to have reset itself somehow. I needed to re-enter the date and time. The camera is one of the digital ones that sort of looks like a regular 35mm, a decent zoom built in but not SLR and you cant put lenses on it or anything. Before I got it I had done some research to see what I wanted, but then this one was on sale and it was the floor model so I got it relatively cheap. Lately I've been all about the bargains. When a big box 'associate' tried to give me $10 off a dvd player because it was also a boxless floor model, I told her that I could go as high as $25 but I didn't think I would pay $36 for a dvd player.
Today I used a gift card to buy a webcam. I really have little use for a webcam but thought it would be fun for my son and I to play with. He loves projects and I saw a cool
demonstration of stop animation I'm hoping to make work. So the gift card would only cover the most basic webcam and I didn't want to spend much or any real money on it. So I looked online for some reviews of the webcam hoping to find that it was very basic but good quality and worked well with few snags. That is not what I found, instead there were only a few reviews but they were all sort of bad saying that it was sort of a hassle. There was only one good one. Here is my theory; anyone who buys a $25 webcam is very unlikely to write a review if it works fine. Its obviously not going to knock anyone's socks off at this price point. But if there was widespread problems a decent number of people would write negative reviews because no matter the price, if something you pay for is really a pain you need to vent and a negative review is a great way to do it. So, the fact that there was only a small handful of negative reviews online despite the fact that this webcam is widely available implies that usually it works ok. This may not be the soundest way to interpret negative reviews, but i like my theory.
[UPDATE, that webcam had exactly the same problems that I had read the reviews abotu nad I had to return it and cough up a few extra buck for a nicer, well reviewed, one.
Here is a movie we made with it.]
