I've been toying with upgrading my little point-and-shoot for awhile now. DSLRs seemed like the next logical step because point-and-shoots just aren't equipped to take those cool blurry background type of pictures. So what was holding me back from taking the plunge? The daunting task of learning all the manual controls and photography lingo while lugging around a heavy camera.

Enter mirrorless cameras. If a point-and-shoot and DSLR ever made a baby, this neat little gadget would be it, with a combination of traits from both parents. The selling points for me were:
- Size: The body is bigger than a point-and shoot, but still much smaller than a DSLR, which allows me to continue carrying a camera with me everywhere I go.
- Picture quality: The ability to use interchangeable lenses allows for DSLR-type pictures, but I suppose this depends on the lens quality.
- Ease of use: There are automatic settings like point-and-shoots but also manual ones like DSLRs (for when I stop being a scaredy-cat).

After I've determined that mirrorless cameras have what I'm looking for, the next step is to find the exact one that best suits my needs. There are currently five brands on the market, but I found this article to be the most comprehensive at the time of publication (excludes the new Nikon). If you only have a few minutes, this article gave a nice summary.

In the end, I decided to go with the Sony Alpha NEX-3. The picture and lens quality is supposedly among the best in its class. The user interface is better suited for people upgrading from a point-and-shoot (like myself), as opposed to downgrading from DSLRs. The tradeoff I did make was the camera size. Sony has the smallest body but with the stock lens attached (biggest of all the brands), it's hard to pass for a compact camera.

I've been having so much fun playing with my new toy the last few days. Learning the camera setup hasn't been too difficult. The automatic setting "dumbs" things down for me nicely ("bkground defocus"?!), cool features like the sweep panoramic mode, but most of all, the picture quality is crisper than my point-and-shoot (with my skills, it's hard to tell unless I put photos side-by-side, lol).

Two goals for me in the near future are:
1) Figure out how to use the self-timer properly to focus. It's all fun and games when I'm behind the camera, but frustrating when the self-timer is set. If I had known how troublesome it is to take self-portraits, I would've paid more for the NEX-5, which at least could be used with a remote.
2) Slowly learn the manual controls and push the limits of what this camera is capable of. For now, outfit pictures using the automatic setting on a self-timer with wayward focus:

I'm probably the only person left on earth who doesn't own an iPod, hahaha. But that's changed since I won an iPod shuffle (which I like to refer to as the iShuffle :P) from my company. I was 1 of 25 chosen from a random drawing for referring candidates to jobs :O That's a double bonus because I've never won anything in my life!
I wasn't too thrilled about the silver because it's so... neutral. That's probably the reason why they were chosen :) I thought about exchanging it at the Apple store, but there wasn't a color I really wanted and who knows if I can even exchange without a receipt. So, I kept my silver iShuffle. Is it crazy that it took me 15 minutes to open and take it out?! For such a small box and deceptively simple design, there were a ton of tape keeping it in place.
Next up was moving songs onto my iShuffle. I can readily admit I felt like such a dino and needed to read the instruction manual to figure out how to use the thing and sync it up with iTunes :P So after fiddling around with iTunes for half an hour, I finally was able to import about 50 songs in. And voila, I could hear music! Hooray! I guess I'm just not really a music person, but I found the whole setting up your playlist, organizing songs, etc. to be such a chore. It's definitely an easy-to-use product once you figure out how to work it. That's not much of a surprise because it is an Apple product after all! One gripe I will mention is that the control on the earbud is situated too high for me. I wish there's a way to move it lower. I suppose it's something I'll get used to, so no biggie.