I am of the opinion that there are two kinds of people in the world: People who take pictures, and people who don’t.

For most of my life I have fallen into the latter category, but of necessity, I am having to learn something about taking photographs so that I can better document my adventures in crochet.

To that end, I have gotten a new camera (or at least new to me): A Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18 pictured here with some gratuitous crochet:

The camera arrived late yesterday at the end of a week that had felt long by Tuesday night, so the only thing I managed to do was charge the battery, install it in the camera, and set the date and time. And even if I had managed to do more, I still can’t take a picture of the camera with the camera itself.

Since beginning this blog, I have been using the camera on my phone, and while I love my phone camera because I always have it with me, know how to use it, and can email the photos to myself and then easily upload them to this blog and my ravelry account, I have noticed that it has limitations.

The limitation I notice most is that the colors as they appear in photos are not always as they appear in life. Since color is a huge component of my crochet work, that is the limitation that bothers me the most.

The second limitation is most apparent when I photograph a large piece (such as an afghan). If I get a picture of the entire piece the details are lost, and if I get close enough to get detail, the sense of the whole is lost. I am hoping that the lens on the new camera allows me to get somewhat better photos of the larger works.

As for the bag, it is based on Julie Armstrong Holetz’s pattern, messenger bag, featured in Kim Werker’s book, crochet me: Designs to Fuel the crochet revolution.