The Junior Photographer

I have taken well over twenty thousand photos (including two or three good ones!) since Jared was born, so the kids are kinda used to seeing me with a camera. Lately, Jared had been playing with the toy cameras at school a lot and asking if he could take a picture with mine. (Given the camera I have now, the answer is an emphatic "absolutely not!") He got hold of a disposable that was laying about and used that up (we still need to get it developed to see the pictures he took.) We certainly don't want to discourage any artistic interest he might have, so we got him a digital camera for his birthday.

No, we didn't get him one like mine, we got him the Fisher-Price digital camera. Were he a little older, (he's only five, after all,) we might have gotten him a used, regular digital camera, but at this age the durability of the Fisher-Price camera was more desirable than the better resolution and quality of, say, a used Nikon on eBay. So far, Jared seems to love his camera.

Technically, it's not a great camera. It's got 8MB of internal memory which holds about 60 photos, because the resolution is only 640x480 -- about a third of a megapixel. It has an LCD screen, of sorts -- it's 1.3" across diagonally, about an inch by half an inch -- although it kinda requires a child's imagination to be useful. Still, despite its technical limitations, there are a lot of things I like about this camera.

First off, it's built "Kid-Tough" -- it's designed to be carried around, dropped, and banged up during the normal course of use by a five-year-old. It's easy for kids to hold and the double viewfinder (think viewmaster) is a great idea for little kids. It has a flash too. You can add a Secure Digital flash memory card to store more pictures. I picked up a high-speed, brand name card for Jared -- 1GB for less than $20, including tax and shipping -- that will hold more than 8,000 pictures.

Another thing I like is that as far as my computer is concerned, the camera just looks like another removable drive. That means that in order to get the pictures into the computer, you just copy them over. They're regular old JPEG files so you can use whatever image editing software you like for viewing and editing them. Although the camera comes with software, I prefer the excellent -- and free -- Irfanview for basic viewing and editing and the very powerful Paint Shop Pro for more advanced stuff.

Don't just take my word for it, though. I asked Jared what he thought about it and here's what he said: "I like the camera. 'cause I like to take pictures, number one and number two, for all the pictures that I take. I would take a big picture of my friends." There you have it, a resounding vote of confidence. And, here are some samples of his work: