France Photos

The photos that I publish from now through next summer should all be my personal photos. Monday's post had a couple of photos I took at the Jardin du Luxembourg and Notre Dame. I am very excited because my wife and I bought a new camera for our year in France. I will permit myself one photo that I did not take, of the Olympus SZ-12, which we bought at Wal-Mart.

Now, for camera geeks, this is not a big deal. In fact, it's not even a deal. This is not an SLR camera. It didn't cost me one or two thousand dollars (or even two hundred dollars). It doesn't have loads of manual controls. But what it does have (24x optical zoom and good automatic controls with a few manual controls, is more than enough for me. We can still take decent pictures like we would with a point-and-shoot, but the zoom enables us to take pictures of things we could only wistfully gaze at from afar before, like this gargoyle on the Notre Dame cathedral:

If I had a spiffier camera, I wouldn't know what to do with it anyway. So this is not a recommendation necessarily (get what works for you), but rather my saying, I love my new camera! I hope you like the photos this year.