Big Bend National Park With A Kodak EasyShare DX6490

Big Bend National Park, in West Texas. One of my favorite places in my little world to visit. I have been visiting Big Bend since my childhood. We used to spend Thanksgiving in the Basin, camping with my Grandparents and whatever aunts or uncles and cousins would come. We’d spend Thanksgiving dinner eating in the Lodge overlooking the Window trail. I havent had much time to spend in Big Bend since then. Several years ago my wife and kids and friends of ours decided to take our little ones out into the desert and have an Easter vacation.

At the time I didn’t have a DSLR, I had a Kodak EasyShare DX6490 4.0 Megapixel camera. It was my first digital camera. I traded up from a Canon Rebel XS 35mm. This little camera was great. I shot my first wedding with it and while I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone, it worked out just fine. It did the job but things easily could have not gone as planned. It is a great camera but not for shooting weddings professionally.

My 8 yr old daughter uses it now. She’s been using it since she was 6. I know it seems like a lot of camera for such a young person but she has such an eye for photography that the Little Tykes 2 MP camera we bought her just wasn’t working. She has taken some really beautiful photos with this camera and i will be sharing some of those with you soon. This one of my wife and I she took of us in California’s Sequoia National Park. She laid on the ground and shot towards the sky to help capture the enormous size of these magnificent trees.

This camera had a 38-380 mm zoom or a 10x Optical zoom. It didn’t have an Image Stabilizer (IS) and that made long distance shots very hard to get on the first try but for what I wanted at the time, it was a great upgrade from my Rebel.

We spend about 4 days in the Desert that year and I used up every bit of the 4 GB’s of memory I had. I took some beautiful photos of the Chisos Basin from the US Mexican Border. I also took some beautiful sunset photos from the doorway of our room and the Basin Lodge.

All-in-all it was one of my favorite collections, and I did it all with self-taught knowledge and a point and shoot camera. I tell you this to give you an example of how even you can take beautiful photos with the equipment that you have. You don’t need a $3,000 camera, you just need to understand the abilities and limitations of the one you have. In the next post I will be discussing the different functions of the camera as well as other aspects such as aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. All of these things when used together can be used to make your photos really come alive.

Take a minute and check out some of my Big Bend Collection. I really enjoyed this trip and I really enjoyed using my Kodak.