Happy Birthday to Me

Ok so my birthday was actually more than a month ago, but I like to stretch it out as long as I can. For me, my birthday really started about 2 months ago (a month or so before the actual date), when I started dropping hints about what I was hoping to get. Cory and Tina got together and they came up with the idea of getting me a new digital camera. A great idea, only they wanted me to pick out my own because they know that I am fussy when it comes to electronics. I don't want junk that I am going to have to replace in a few months, and I don't want to spend a fortune just to get a bunch of bells and whistles I will never use.

I spent the next couple of weeks looking at fliers, trying to get a feel for what was available and at what price. A couple of weeks before my birthday I ended up going to Future Shop and picked up a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ4. It is a nice little camera for the money, it is a 4mega-pixal camera with 12x Optical Zoom. The one option that I went for that was probably over-kill was the 2 gig memory card.

It has all of the same features that most other cameras have. You can set it for mountains, for close ups, for parties, for portraits, etc, etc. Then there is the "Simple Mode" or "automatic" setting. If you don't know what you are doing set the camera to this setting and it will figure it out for you. Now I am not a photographer by any stretch of the imagination, but I am not an idiot either, I can figure out if I am shooting a portrait, or a landscape, I can tell if it is light or dark. However when I try to set the camera manually to the way I think it should be for the picture, my pictures always turn out lousy. Whenever I set it to "Simple Mode" the camera takes a descent picture. It’s almost like the camera is mocking me.

Anyway, the whole reason I started talking about this camera was to state how much I enjoy digital photography. It is a cheap way to experiment with photography. I have just finished downloading over 130 pictures that I have taken so far this weekend. I couldn't imagine what the cost of getting all of those pictures developed would have been if I was using film. That is the first message I wanted to get across, Digital Cameras are good. Below is a sample picture, it shows my kids splashing and playing around in some very cold water on a cold day. You will notice my niece on the dock is actually wearing a winter coat under her lifejacket.

The second point I wanted to get across was, Stretch Your Birthdays. It is not often that you get a chance when everybody is focusing their attention on you, so when it happens enjoy it and make it last. Here are a few pointers to help you get started.

1. Start Early - Get people thinking about you early by dropping hints about what you would like to receive as a gift, or the type of cake and meal you would like.
2. Celebrate Late - If you are having a celebration with extended family and friends always try to put this off as late as possible, I try to aim for two weeks later. Your immediate family will always celebrate with you near the actual date anyway, so when your party does comes around it will be like having a second birthday.
3. Avoid Competition - This is the hardest one of all, but it is the one with the biggest payoff. Everyone in my family has their birthdays between August and December, except me, mine is in April. So after Christmas the next thing people have to worry about is my birthday, and I can stretch it out without it running into anybody else’s. My brother was born a few days before Christmas that was poor planning on his part. My daughter and my niece were both born on the same day 2 years apart. There again that is another case of bad planning.
4. Keep Mentioning It - Always try to find a reason to mention your birthday. Try starting a conversation by saying "remember at my birthday, when so and so did...". Or find a reason to mention it in a Blog.