Photography: Fresh Cameras & Gear for 2008!

This year's biggest camera show known as PMA 08, in Las Vegas is well underway, and there have been some pretty awesome releases and announcements. These things are ranging from affordable consumer (and prosumer!) cameras, to high-end technology that you probably can't afford but want anyway.

It looks like bigger LCDs, image stabilization, and face detection are what's hot now, and steep prices are a thing of the past! Canon announced its new A series cameras, now boasting more features and cheaper price tags! The model that mainly caught my eye was the A590. It features full manual control, Optical Image Stabilization, and a handsome 2.5" screen, all for $180! They've got some other lower models which are a bit cheaper, but drop features like the optical stabilization and manual control. Yea, it may not be the thinnest and most advanced point and shoot on the market, but for its price and what it can do, this is the piece to buy if you've been meaning to get into digital-photography (or looking for an awesome update over that 3MP brick you keep in a briefcase).

Canon has definitely been on a roll in the last few days announcing a new version of the Rebel series (Rebel XSi), 4 new prosumer and professional lens (1, 2, 3, 4), amongst a few other things. Now, clearly, Canon isn't the only company exhibiting at the biggest photography show. There are some other big names like Nikon, and Fuji on the block with some eye-turners too...Okay, as you can probably already tell, I'm a Canon fan, but I like the competitors too! For the longest time, I was nothing but a consumer-level photographer until I decided to make the plunge and bought a DSLR (I currently own the Canon 40D - which is a great camera!).

Fujifilm has this new colorful line of cameras that features a blog mode! What the heck can a camera with a blog mode do? Well, it's quite simple. It has an automatic downsizer of photos and videos that are captured with it so you can easily upload them to Flickr, Fotki, YouTube, Viddler, or wherever you share your stuff!

First of all, as far I'm aware, all the video uploading services have their own compressors and what not working in their basements to properly display them and such. And with photos, all sharing sites pretty much have enough storage to store your best photos. I can see this feature being handy when image size/quality isn't all that important, and you need to take a lot of pics on its 45mb built in storage.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for 2008, and anything dealing with technology, as with every other year and I'm looking forward to some more awesomeness!

Sidenote: January will soon come to pass, and the remainder of the fresh new year won't be as "new" anymore. For me, this month started off to be pretty successful, and productive. I've made a to-do list for the entire year (which took me a while!) and I plan to achieve each and every one of them, since I stayed within realities grasp to make it all possible. I'll be writing a post on productivity very soon discussing achievements, goals, etc.