YAY! My Zumi cam­era came in the mail yes­ter­day! This is a birth­day / Christ­mas / the­sis com­ple­tion present from Mike :D (even though the­sis is not exact­ly com­plete­ly com­plet­ed…) I’ve been want­i­ng to get a Diana for a long time, but was always weary about the cost of film and pic­ture devel­op­ing. So I was real­ly excit­ed when I came across the Zumi, because the qual­i­ty and unpre­dictabil­i­ty of the pic­tures are like film, but only dig­i­tal! :D

So we test­ed it out last night! This is a pho­to of the box and the (pink!) plas­tic dinosaur it came with.

The sun was just set­ting as we were fid­dling with the camera.

Very sat­u­rat­ed colours of the sunset.

And then I took this sad pic­ture of the dead flow­ers we put out­side on the bal­cony after it was infest­ed with bugs while we were away on the weekend :(

As you can see in the first pic­ture, it has a black and white mode. It also records video with sound. I real­ly like the unpre­dictabil­i­ty and the sur­pris­es that it brings. Espe­cial­ly being so used to dig­i­tal cam­eras with pre­view and know­ing exact­ly what I’m tak­ing a pic­ture of, the guess­work of a viewfind­er (which actu­al­ly isn’t very accu­rate) is a rather inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence… I took around 80 pic­tures to get 8 that are worth keep­ing. I think it’s bet­ter for tak­ing dis­tant scenery than close-up shots of peo­ple or objects… just because it’s so hard to gauge what I’m aim­ing at. But I’m hap­py with it! Oh it also has a superb macro func­tion which is in focus at pre­cise­ly 3cm away from the object, but not at 5cm, 1cm, or 10cm.

Look at the tex­ture of that leaf!

I usu­al­ly have a real­ly hard time spend­ing mon­ey on what is essen­tial­ly a toy. But we’re tak­ing a trip to Hong Kong in a month, and I think this cam­era can cap­ture some inter­est­ing images of my homeland.

Plan­ning on bring­ing it out to the Dis­tillery and Nuit Blanche on the week­end — stay tuned for more Zumi pic­tures! :D

Have a great week­end everyone!