espite the artsy-sounding page title and purty title graphic, you can be almost positive that nothing in this section will rise above the quality of a hurried snap shot.

For the most part these pictures are of entirely mundane things and people; whatever I happen to point my digicam at and get more or less in focus.  I often post these on the main page in the daily updates, and while this section is not a full archive, it does host most of the best images, the ones I think are especially interesting or representative.  It's also a handy thing to link to, if someone asks what I look like, or about my pets, or where I ride my bike, or what cheetahs look like when they are eating five pounds of raw ground beef.

One third art gallery, one third reference archive, and two quarters gay porn -- it's the BlackChampagne photo section!

(Lots of the links in the nav bar to the right are under construction/coming soon.  Forgive the 404s, but updating this section has been pretty far down the ever-growing "to do" list for some time, now.

Page Contents

While the photo pages linked to above are the meat of this section, don't ignore the rest of this page in your hurry to see my nudity obscured by naught but a large reptile. On this page I talk about using digital cameras, give numerous tips on how to optimize your picture-taking experience as well as battery life, detail my first camera, talk about my much-better second camera, and compare shots side by side so you can see the difference.

The moral? Buy the best camera you can afford; there's a huge difference between a good camera and a cheap one, and you'll notice that difference in every photo of anything more complicated than someone standing still, 10 feet from you, outside, on a bright sunny day.

Click the following links to jump to that portion of this page, or just scroll down to read it all.

• Basic Digital Camera Info
• Camera Tips
• Camera #1: Toshiba PDR-M25
• Camera #2: Olympus C-755
• Two Camera Comparison

Basic Digital Camera Info

Digicams are very handy and convenient.  You can take a ton of pictures (literally hundreds or thousands if you go for smaller size/image quality) and can use the digicam just like a regular film camera, by peering through the view finder, as well as using the view screen to preview your image. The images are very quick and easy to remove from the camera to your computer, and you can preview them on the camera as you take them.  Plus since you aren't wasting anything other than storage space, you can take several pictures of everything, and then sort through them later on your computer, picking the best ones to save.

The downside is that they use up batteries very quickly, the preview screens are usually far too small to be of any use, and if you want hard copies of them you need a really good printer and good paper, or else you have to make a trip to Kinko's or Longs or some such place to have them make prints by the shot. Don't bother with the cheap home printers and paper; those shots will fade out in a year or less.  Get a good one, or use a commercial one. Most photo stores now offer printing from digital camera photos on full quality photo stock paper, and you can do it with automated machines as well. We've printed out quite a few shots on the machine at Longs, where it's $.45 for two shots.  Less than a quarter a shot isn't too bad, especially since you only have to get the really good ones printed out, rather than all 36 from the roll on a film camera, when there might be only 4 or 6 shots worth printing from that one.

You'll probably need to get another memory card as well, since the ones that ship from the factory with cameras are pathetically small. There are a lot of different storage types, so be sure you know what you're buying when you go to get it. Check prices; www.outpost.com is affiliated with Fry's, and they've got pretty low prices, but other places might be cheaper.  I wouldn't buy online myself; memory chips die pretty regularly and you'll want to be able to easily return it.  Wherever you get yours, be sure you get quality memory. Do not get the generic to save a few bucks: it's very likely to die while a name brand would still have been under warranty.  Good cards will have a 3 year, 5 year, or even lifetime replacement guarantee.

As for card size, get the biggest you can afford, but don't go insane. I got a 128MB card for my first camera, after the 32MB generic I got died after about four months, and that was frankly larger than I needed. Even on the highest size and highest quality setting I could take 133 shots, on the next lowest setting I could take over 300, and on low quality I could take almost 2000. Since a change of batteries were good for about 80 or 100 shots at best, I always ran out of batteries before I ran out of disk space. I never got anywhere near filling the 128 card up, since I just hooked it up to my computer and offloaded shots every day. I suppose if you were going on a camping trip or vacation and were going to be taking 60 or 80 shots a day  without computer access, you might need the biggest card, or a couple of medium-sized ones to switch out when they got full, but for almost all regular use, you'll never approach filling the memory card.  I considered a 512MB card for my new camera, but settled for the 256MB, and even that's huge; I can take over 150 shots on highest quality, batteries permitting.

Camera Tips

With most cameras, you must use the video screen if you want to see what the zoom will look like, but if you have a cheap camera the screen will be nearly impossible to see in bright daylight, too dark to be of any predictive use when taking shots at night, and far too small to tell if a shot you have already taken is in focus, blurry, etc.  The screen on my first camera, the Toshiba PDR-M25 was of no use other than very rough aim when I was using the digital zoom. I simply looked through the eyehole to aim the camera, 95% of the time, and didn't even have the screen turned on, to save on battery life.

Most digicams allow you to edit the images on the camera, delete bad pics, cut the image quality to free up disk space, etc.  All nifty features, but when you are trying to do that on a thumbnail-sized screen, it's pretty pointless.  Plus any time the camera is on and the screen is lit, you are draining the batteries very quickly.  Wait and edit shots on your computer at home, and don't bother with that stuff on the camera unless you have to delete some shots to free up card space, or really like buying new batteries.

You should consider rechargable batteries for your camera if you are going to use it regularly. You can get big packs of generic batteries very cheaply, at CostCo for example, but you'll still save money in the long run with good rechargable ones. Lots of good cameras come with 4 rechargables and a charger, so you just need to buy another 4 batteries to have a spare set, and you're good to go.  Otherwise you'll have to buy your own charger and batteries; go ahead and do it, it'll pay for itself soon enough. Get the good kind of batteries, they'll stand up to a lot more recharges, and they last a lot longer per charge.

If you're going to take a lot of photos around the house, shots of your pets or amateur porn or whatever, you might want to get an adaptor. You can get one with a 12 or 15 foot cord, and take and offload all the photos you want without ever using up any batteries.

When you are using batteries, there are several ways to make them last longer.

• Turn off the camera the second you're done snapping.
• Learn to power it on and take a photo quickly. This means don't dick around with simulated film speeds, telephoto zooming, black and white, etc.  If you need to zoom, do it quickly and surely.
• Take photos in about the largest possible size/quality.  This is mostly dependent upon your memory card capacity, and larger size/quality photos will give you more margin for error.  Shrinking down images hides blurry and fuzzy shots nicely, but they need to be big in the first place to let you shrink them and still remain visible.
• Take multiple photos when possible, from slightly different angles or distances, just in case.
• Don't view the shots on the camera, and especially don't edit them on it.

Why not edit and view on the camera? It eats batteries quickly, but also since the view screen isn't really large enough to tell if the photos are in focus anyway. You need to put them on your computer for that.

My Camera #1

I got my first digital camera, a Toshiba PDR-M25, in late June 2002, as a birthday present. You can read my initial reactions to it and see some of my first photos in the daily updates from June 28, 29, and 30. That being said, this is not a buying guide.

I don't comparison shop much, though my dad does.  He loves digging through Consumer Reports and looking at comparison articles on the Internet, and finding who is selling the selected item for cheapest. For that reason I generally ask him to assist me in selecting any major purchases, especially of tricky stuff like hi-tech items.  Like digital cameras.

This is relevant (barely) since the Toshiba PDR-M25 (see it discussed on Amazon.com) he got me for my birthday got a decent rating in the Consumer Reports reviews, and was on sale for a very good price at CostCo.  It cost around $200 at the time, and came with an 8MB flash card for memory.  Which isn't very big, as the factory standard memory cards usually aren't, but larger storage cards are cheap.

Toshiba PDR-M25 camera features:

• 2 megapixel image quality
• 1792x1200 max resolution
• Optical zoom: 3x
• Digital zoom: 2x
• 10 Sec self timer
• Rapid Fire: 16 shots/4 seconds no flash (only works if the camera is held completely steady, and the target isn't moving much)

There are a ton of other technical specs if you care to look, but these are the main ones.

This camera is pretty good, but I wouldn't buy another one of the same model.  My main complaints are that the video screen is far too small to be of much use either when taking photos or when previewing them, that there's no way to set the lens to a given focal depth, and that the camera uses up batteries very quickly.

This particular camera also is very low-tech/idiot-proof, in terms of having no user-adjustable lens; it's completely and exclusively auto-focus.  This is great for photos of a single target with a clear line of sight in the day time, and it's pretty good at night if the light isn't too bad and what you want to take a photo of is in front.  If you want to take a picture of someone or something behind leaves or a tree limb or past a doorway, or photograph something in dim light, auto-focus sucks.  You basically just point and hope.  I've often tried to take pictures of myself with the camera timer and the camera sitting on my desk, and when viewing them later found that the edge of the desk was in perfect focus, and everything else was a blur.  Or that the camera timed the image for when the flash was hitting a wall to one side, rather than whatever I was aiming at.

The Toshiba is very poor at low-light photography also.  It's fine at night with a flash, for a single target that's nearby, but if you just want to take a picture after dark, especially in an area with lights, you are going to find it pretty much impossible.  The image will always be way too dark to see, since the camera adjusts for whatever the brightest light source is.  I also have to adjust a lot of the images in Photoshop, especially any taken outside on an overcast day.  The images usually look washed out, and I find that turning up the contrast and brightness some makes them far more vibrant and attractive.

So the Toshiba is fine for simple things and it's easy to use, but when I get another digicam, I will be sure to upgrade.  My next camera will probably have a much larger view screen for that to be useful, though I could just use the eyehole view 95% of the time, as I use it 99% of the time now.  But I would definitely want one with a real lens, or at least a way to set a given focal depth. Auto-focus is convenient, but makes it literally impossible to take photos in many locations and lighting conditions.

My Camera #2

Two years after I got my first digital camera, I upgraded to an Olympus C-755. It was a birthday present bought from Costco.com for the very low price of $380. The MSRP was about $550 at the time, so we got quite a deal, taking advantage of a short term $100 off special on the CostCo website. The C-755 is a special version of the Olympus C-750 that's only sold at CostCo. (They're offering it for $480 as of June 26, 2004, if you want one.) The two models are identical, other than the number.

So what's the C-750 got?  I have not explored every feature yet, but it's vastly superior to my old Toshiba.  The Olympus has 4 megapixel image quality, takes shots with much higher resolution, has many more resolution sizes and options, has 10x optical and 4x digital zoom, allowing for 40x zoom (though you really need to sit the camera on a table or tripod or something in that mode, since any tiny finger jiggle will make you miss the shot entirely).  It takes timer photos, can take multiple pictures every time you press the button, and it even takes movies in two image qualities, both of which aren't bad at all.  It's not as good as a digital camcorder, but the movies certainly have image quality that's equal to your average online movie trailer.

There are also multiple photo modes, and they really do work. There are eight photo modes; such things as landscape, panorama, portrait, nighttime, sports, etc. And it's not just a wheel with various settings on it to make you feel better about paying more money for the camera. They do work. The landscape takes longer to snap the photo, but it focuses everything in. Foreground, background, etc. Sports is for quicker shots, and it works as soon as you push the button, catching things in motion. Nighttime mode enhances the visible light and damps down the brighter points of light so you don't have a black shot with blinding yellow glare from every streetlight.  And so on.  You can use one mode for another type of shot; it's not like you have to pick just the correct mode to get a shot in focus, and they overlap somewhat, but I've noticed big differences between the camera modes in just the few days I've had to play around with it thus far.

Besides the various options mentioned above, there are three huge improvements, when comparing the new camera to the old one. The new camera:

• Has a far brighter, clearer, and crisper LCD screen.
• Takes photos that are much brighter and more clearly focused.
• Is far better at auto-focusing on what I want it to focus on, and it handles non-brilliant light far better.

The Olympus' LCD screen reverses almost everything I said about the Toshiba above. The Olympus' screen is almost like a very small computer monitor. I can see every detail, read writing, tell if a picture is in focus, etc. You could watch DVDs on it and not complain too much about the image quality, if that were a supported option. And it's really the screen sharpness that matters, since the LCD itself isn't much larger than the one in my first camera. It's just so much brighter and has about 4x sharper resolution that it seems larger. When using the first camera, I never looked at the LCD screen while taking a photo, unless I was in full zoom mode. It was just too fuzzy to tell anything from, so I always looked through the eye view, which was just a sort of window that showed a bit of optical zoom, and was useful to aim the shot with.  I always use the LCD screen on the new camera, since it's often a better view than my eye, if I'm in any sort of zoom mode.

I hoped for a better LCD, and saw how clear they were on equivalent cameras in the store, but I was still impressed by the LCD on the new one. I had no idea the lighting would be so improved in photos though, and the first few I took at dusk or in the shadows with the new camera amazed me. I don't know what term I should use to describe it, but the internal hardware, the camera's digital processors, are able to make the image much brighter and more visible than even your naked eye. My old Toshiba was not much use in low lighting, and the photos it took, even on a cloudy day, were dingy-looking. Dark and drab. I always had to up the lighting in Photoshop once I got to manipulate the image, but that hurt the image quality, plus the light areas would turn blinding, by the time I got the shady spots visible. You really notice that with any visible sky in outdoor shots on the old camera, where from the horizon up the image is just blindingly light gray.  The new camera can get the land clear and bright, while keeping the sky blue and non-blinding, and that was simply impossible with the old Toshiba.

Photo Comparison

Honestly, there isn't that much difference between the best shots on my old 2megapixel Toshiba and average shots on my new 4megapixel Olympus. If you have a clear view of something stationary and it's relatively nearby in good light, pretty much any digital camera will take an excellent picture. The Olympus photo will be sharper in full quality, larger, and have a higher resolution, but if all you're viewing is a cropped, reduced size/quality version online, you'd probably be hard-pressed to tell the difference.

The problem, as you've no doubt realized, is that I'm using perfect conditions for my comparison. And since the majority of real life photography takes place in very imperfect conditions, the higher quality camera will make a very big difference as soon as you take more than about a dozen photos.

This isn't a great comparison, but it gives you some idea. The photo on the left was taken with the old 2 megapixel camera, while the purple flowers/weeds on the right were photographed with the new 4 megapixel camera.  The purple weeds are clearer than the old camera could ever show them, but that photo was taken much closer to the target than the one on the left.

If you really want to see the difference, you need to click on them both, since at full size you see how fuzzy the edges of the old photo are, and how impossibly clear and detailed the purple blooms and spiky seed pods are in the new camera photo.

These two are almost exactly side by side. Malaya took the one on the left with my old camera, while I took the one on the right with the new one. Again, it's hard to tell a big difference in this small image, but if you click the thumbnails to see the full sized shots, you'll notice it much more vividly.  The old camera just can't get the clarity and focus on things in the distance; the beach and rocks to the sides are not really in focus. Look at that patch of longer grass on the bottom of these thumbnails; in the new camera shot, you can see the grass stalks, and a hint of purple flowers on them. To the old camera, that grass is just another clump of green.

Also, while the new photo has had nothing but some resizing done, the old photo has been worked over in Photoshop to make it look as good as it does. I upped the brightness a lot, cropped it down to remove a fuzzy fence post at the bottom, and adjusted the color somewhat. You can't miss the color tint; how much more yellow it is, and that's from the brightness being increased. In theory, I could make the old shot exactly match the new one in light and color, but it would just further degrade the quality of the image. And it's not all that sharp an image in the first place.

This comparison is like the other two, in that you really need to click and view the full size shots to see how different they are. The old camera shot is on top, and it looks gorgeous... until you look at the new camera one, and it's like you've wiped a film off of your monitor. I never realized how dark and dull the shots were in the old camera until I had the new one to compare it with.

Not only can't the old camera manage the crispness of focus, it muddies the colors as well. Check out the gorgeous translucent turquoise of the water in the bottom shot, and compare it to the dark green/blue in the top shot.  The cliffs are a big difference as well, light gray with the reddish lichens for contrast in the new camera shot, while the old camera can't compare. Check out the lichen to the top right of these thumbs, as it fades from green to orange to red to purple in the lower shot. In the top shot, its just sort of dark red/brown.

The detail in shadow is a huge difference with the new camera, and while none of these demonstration comparisons show it that clearly, you can see some of it in the shadowy alcove in the cliff at the top/middle of both shots here. In the top shot, from the old camera, it's just a dark spot with a hint of texture inside. In the new camera shot, you can see every detail of the rock in the shadow.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The old camera shots are okay. The new camera shots are gorgeous.  Also, keep in mind that all of these shots are among the best possible with the old camera. They're outdoors, in sunlight, with excellent visibility. Next time I get out with both cameras, I'll take some shots of things in shadows, or in poor lighting, and you'll see a huge difference between the cameras.