Yellowstone Color

A little experiment here. Well, two. For Christmas, we got a Canon Vixia HF200 video camera. I really like it, though it's evident from the videos I've taken that I've got to learn a lot about videography -- and that we need a tripod badly. The videos are crystal clear and hold up under some pretty good increases in size.

The camera will also take still photos, though as a still camera it's impossibly slow. Still, it gives me a way to snap a few photos while Michelle uses our Canon Rebel digital camera.

So here are a few photos I took while we were in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks over the weekend. A full album is available here on Facebook and here on Uncharted.

I don't admit to being a genius behind the camera. In fact, I'm kind of an idiot behind the camera, given the fate of the three cameras I used while on my mission in France. The first, a little 110 film spy camera type, fell into the toilet after a day-long visit to some chateaux in the Dordogne. Fortunately, when it fell in the toilet, the film popped out and floated. The second camera fell out of my pocket as I was riding my bicycle and was crushed by a passing bus. Again, I was fortunate in that I had just removed a roll of film from the camera, so no photos were lost. The third camera disappeared under mysterious circumstances soon after I came home. It might have to do with the fact that it took really, really poor pictures.

One thing I have noticed with this Canon Vixia is that the photos and video tend to come out a bit darker than the scene or image appears in real life. It could very well be operator error -- I'm the kind of guy who'll pick up a camera and run with it for a few years before I pick up the instruction manual. But one of my goals for the rest of 2010 and the whole of 2011 is to become a better photographer, and part of that is going to be to get to know my cameras better.