Too stupid for my camera?

Did I mention that Fred gave me a new camera for Christmas? It's a beauty, the Panasonic DMC-TZ3. I took it to today's swim meet in Bowling Green and faced the learning curve. After being a Sony girl for over 3 years, it's going to take me a while to get used to some things, but I think in the long run, it's going to be perfect. Today though was not so perfect.

I started off by using the video feature to record Annabelle's 50-yard freestyle. Somehow though, as soon as I started recording I also pushed to stop recording. Therefore, at the end of the race when I pushed again, thinking I was stopping it, I was actually starting it, just in time to capture 12 breathtaking seconds of footage of ceiling, feet, and empty pool as I wandered back to the bleachers.

For her next race, a freestyle relay, I decided to experiment with the burst mode and shoot some stills. I took this picture, which I was quite please with (I'm not down-sizing any of the images in this post, so feel free to click and see the full-size version):



I admired it on my way back to the stands, where I found Fred cheering wildly for some girl in the pool. Who, I inquired, was that? Oh, just Annabelle. Yes, I had taken pictures of the WRONG KID! Everybody around Fred got a good laugh out of that.

Fortunately I also took this picture, thinking it was Annabelle gearing up for her dive, and you can see her cheering and waiting her turn:



I tried video again for Mike's 100-yard breaststroke, because he likes to be able to critique his form afterwards. First, I almost did a repeat of what I did when I tried to tape Annabelle, so I had to start the recording again shortly after his dive. I was a little disappointed in how jerky the quality was:



A practice clip that I shot in the heat before came out fine, so I think it was just a combination of shaky hands and being too close to his lane.

What was NOT disappointing was his performance in the race. He was seeded last in his heat, but he finished fourth. At 1 minute, 17 seconds, and change, he had managed to shave a couple seconds off his time and was ecstatic when he came out of the water:



I shot more stills in burst mode for the freestyle relay that followed immediately. I didn't get anything as good as I got of NOT Annabelle, but here's his dive, which I pulled out of this original photo:



I also managed to get this semi-close up out of this original photo:



It's nice but not as cool as the one I got of NOT Annabelle. Still, swim pictures are really hard, and these are better than any others I've ever taken before, so that is progress. It's a little demoralizing for me to have trouble with something I'm used to being pretty good at. I'll keep working with my new toy though (and maybe even read the instruction book), and I hope to have progressively better pictures to share here soon.