Point and shoot?

Pudgy (View More Photos)

I have a Samsung digital camera. It's a good camera. 99% of the photos that I've been taking are with that camera. This camera is a 6 megapixel camera.

I also have a Canon Powershot digital camera. This is also a good camera. It is a 5 megapixel camera. I don't use it very much, because we've got the Samsung.

I wouldn't care if they were 1,000,024 megapixel cameras, they are junk. Both of the cameras have been rendered useless with the arrival of little Tyler.

I've always believed that I would grow up and be rich. I'm not talking about the high on life, "what more could a man want", "I'm rich in the figurative sense" crap. I'm talking about wiping my butt with hundred dollar bills rich. I'm 30 years old and have not yet begun wiping my butt with hundred dollar bills, but I am here to tell you now that I have found my calling. I now know how I am going to get rich, and I've got Tyler to thank for it.

I am going to develop an affordable digital camera that takes a picture - wait for it - when you press the friggin button! None of this crap where you have to half-press the button, wait 3 seconds while it finds the faces, determines if flash is needed, and auto-focuses. Then you press the button the rest of the way to take the picture. Sure, I could just press the button all the way without doing the half-press, right? No, because it still takes 3 seconds to make those same adjustments, and does a poor job at it if you don't do the half-press. It's not a point and shoot camera. That is a point, click, wait, shoot camera.

It never bothered me before. I said "hold that pose" more times than I care to count. A critical difference between Tyler and most of the rest of the world is that Tyler does not, ever, hold his pose. With each out of focus picture that I take, I curse the digital camera engineers that dropped the ball on this one. When I go through my routine of downloading from camera to pc, tagging, captioning, color correcting, and uploading to SmugMug, I now have to delete hordes of pictures that were about half a second from being the best pictures ever taken, in all the history of the world. And I have a very difficult time deleting photos, blurry or not.

I said to myself, "Self, you just have to be smarter than the camera". I have to think through the problem and find a way to adapt the situation to work for me.

Let's say I want to take a picture of Tyler smiling, a feat in and of iteself. I would hold the camera in position, half-press the button to "prime the engine" and start making goofy sounds. When Tyler smiles, CLICK! Does it work? Not really. See, the camera has a setting on it, if you haven't done anything in 5 or 10 seconds, it assumes you mistakenly pressed the button and goes back to default. So if you get that awesome smile you're looking for and press the button, it takes an additional 3 seconds. The entire time, you're praying to the gods of picture taking that Tyler can hold that smile for just one more freakin' second.

That didn't turn out so well, so I went back to my drawings and flowcharts and schematics to figure out another way. I call this next one "anticipatory picture taking", APT for short. I thought of calling it "Anticipatory Shooting of Subject", but I didn't think the anagram would catch on. What you do is, you make your silly face or goofy sound, and take a picture, in anticipation of his smiling response. Does it work? Well, I did manage to get a couple pictures of Ty smiling, and about 50 of him making no face at all. Then about another 50 where half his face is cut off because I wasn't able to pay attention to the aim of the camera.

My last attempts had me snapping picture after picture and crossing my fingers that I'd get a good one. I think that all I've succeeded in doing is damaging my son's eyesight. No way should it be safe to look at a camera flash as much as he has.

These cameras have a dial at the top of them where I can select if I want to take a photo, a movie, a scenic shot, and about 5 other settings that nobody ever uses. How hard would it be to add another setting where it is in constant auto-focus mode? Sure, it'll eat the batteries faster, but I'll be able to snap a pic the very moment I need to. I don't mind charging my batteries more often, if it means that I get more of the pictures that I want.

So, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to run to the patent office to tell them my idea of a camera that takes a picture when you press the button.