camera mia

Having used a smartphone camera for a while and pretty often, I noticed a few quirks about it that's been pushing me to look for other alternatives for amateur hobby for fun photography:

• The lens is tiny and it has a distortion to it that I think makes it pretty bad for.... almost everything? Anything closer to edges of the screen looks larger and closer than it actually is, while anything in center looks smaller and further away than it actually is. That could work some experimental angles, but that's not why I use a quick and convenient camera for most of the time.
• Without doing some annoying post-edits, the camera will not capture the color/shade/brightness/whatever like I see it. This would be fine if it had a look to it, but the colors feel usually dull and sometimes just inaccurate, even with editing.
• So it's oddly neither good for selfies or nature/street photos, which is what I usually use it for.

I know that the big benefit of phone cameras is how convienent and fast and relatively detailed they are. And I won't, and can't, argue against those points, especially for the layman. But I want Accuracy To Reality. I want the skyline that I see look as proportionally large as I see it, I want the tree that's 5 meters away from me not look like it's 25 meters away, and so on.

A while ago I impulse bought a DSLR camera in inspiration from, sigh, Life is Strange. I didn't want to deal with film, but rather have photos in digital format so they can be easily edited on the computer if I wanted to, and a lens that didn't cause the cell phone distortion. I spent quite a bit of my time learning about aperture, focal lenghts, ISO and the cameras settings. In the end I've used the camera...... a total of 6 times? In the past 8 or so years I've owned it?
The issue was that it was just a smidge too bulky. I needed a separate bag to carry it around, and it was often difficult to catch photos of spontatnous moments. I've also found image editing to be a rather tiresome activity. So on the whole it is a perfectly fine camera, but I didn't have the Photographer Spirit to wield it.

R.I.P. (Burried in one of my drawers).

Last year I got the photography passion running again (think I was in a Get Off The Phone phase) and decided to try on digital cameras from the early 2000s. The internet told me they worked not only good, but that they had a certain Look onto them that makes them feel different from the cameras of today. Something something CCL or whatever. Either way I got sold in and eventually got a Pentax Optio S40.

There is a video of me doing the fortnite dance in this thing

I will be upfront that haven't been good at using it either. Some photos from home here and there. But I stumbled upon an issue where it wouldn't detect (or even quickly drain?) the batteries. I looked more into it and apparently that model is notorious for being picky about which types of AA batteries it uses well (didn't even know that was a thing). So I have to order some CR-V3 batteries (basically the best type of battery for old digital cameras, but they are pretty uncommon in stores it seems) to get the thing work reliably. I will give that a chance and try to stick with it. Otherwise I might have to try out a different digital camera, old or modern.