New Camera

Well, Amanda and I had to get a new camera. And I really mean that we had to! Over the years I have been using a great camera that has been through much, but as of late, has been less-than-reliable on picture quality.

In my very first area on my mission (after being in the country for about 1 or 2 months) I met a wonderful member who was going to be married to a member in the US and move there with him. They were both older and he was a widower and they had met online through one of those LDS dating sites. Anyways, I ask where he's from and she said California, so after getting more details it turns out that this brother lived in Rancho Cucamonga and was in Ken Kirtley's ward!! To make a long story short, they agrees to bring me a Christmas package when he came down, and I sent some stuff back with them for my family. One of the things in the package was my digital camera. The point of this story was to give you an idea of the age of this camera. This puts me receiving it around Dec. 2004.
(Here's the old camera):























Now more than four years of use (almost half of which was in company of a Missionary, so a lot of use), it has started to get old. It was a Canon PowerShot A75 and had 3.2 mega pixels.

So I have a Citi credit card that gets me great rewards which I can redeem through this thing called the ThankYou network. It's great and I have got some great stuff because of this rewards program. One of the most recent ones was 3x$50 Best Buy gift cards that we were going to use to buy Rock Band 2. Well when I got those cards, and we started looking for RB2, nowhere had it, and I mean nowhere! Within a 60 mile radius, we found one store (a Wal-Mart that had just received a shipment) that had a couple RB2's. The store was located in Riverside (about 30 minutes away) and Amanda, being the loving wife she is, went with me around 9:30-10pm at night to get one of these few RB2's. Obviously, we had left over gift cards for Best Buy now.

Then right after that, our camera started making funny pictures (there is a old vs. new at the bottom of this post) that were purple, grainy, and/or blurry. But this didn't always happen, just sometimes, and slowly got more frequent. Than, in our recent trip to Las Vegas (post on that coming soon!), every time we turned it on it was acting up and I had to shake it around to get the right picture quality. So even though we were going to wait 'till Amanda's b-day, we decided tonight to get a camera. We had already picked out the one that we wanted and just had to decide on color. Here is what we got:

















It's a Canon PowerShot SD780 IS and is 12.1 mega pixels. We just got the battery charged but are excited to have a reliable, functional, and improved camera to play with and document our lives.

Old vs. New (please ignore the mess, we are in the middle of laundry):





























For another example of the old disfunctionality see here.

Anyways, we love our new camera and can't wait to use it!