(See description of camera below.)

A couple of Isako's flowers:


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Pictures from Portola Farms stable:
(Isako's riding lesson, and random horses)

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Pictures of my cat Nick:

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Pictures of cats at a couple of local animal shelters we recently visited
(Peninsula Humane Society and Pets In Need):
(we visited to browse - no, we didn't take one home)

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And finally a picture of the bay from in front of my old apartment in Foster City:

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June, 2002 - After doing quite a bit of research on the web, we decided to buy a Canon S30 digital camera.  (Click here for a review of the S40, which is almost identical to the S30 except the S40 has 3.9 Mpixel instead of 3.2 Mpixel.)  We got it for $450 from B&H Photo, a very reliable camera shop on the web.  I found a couple of interesting articles on the web comparing speeds of different CompactFlash cards (see here and here), and then we bought a Kingston 128 MB CF card and an extra Canon battery (needed due to the camera's short battery discharge time) from PC Mall.

The camera is great!  It has lots of features, including fully manual exposure settings if you want to use them and settings like auto-exposure compensation (up to +/- 2 stops) and flash exposure compensation (also up to +/- 2 stops) and a decent optical zoom range and motion video capability, and it's quite small, and the resolution is good (good enough for our purposes), and the ZoomBrowser software works very well in Win XP on my home PC.  The built-in flash isn't super-powerful, but it's acceptable for normal indoor lighting up to a reasonable distance, maybe 15-20 feet.  Overall, the picture quality we've gotten has been very good.  I think the only significant problem I've run into is that occasionally in low light or with featureless subjects the autofocus doesn't work, but the manual focus mode works fairly well as a backup.

Here are the best of the first crop of pictures I've taken with the camera, after having it for a little less than a month.  (I reduced the size of all of the pictures from the full camera resolution, and I had to lighten one of the horse pictures and lighten and sharpen the kitten picture, which was a little out of focus for some reason -- other than that they're exactly as they came out of the camera.)