PowerShot

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Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Background: For the Europe trip, I had bought a new Canon PowerShot A710 IS. It was a pretty slick little camera and I was proud of it. Unlike point-and-shoot cameras, it allowed the user to have full manual control over focus, shutter speed, aperture, white balance, etc. So it was a halfway-serious photography tool while being a fraction of the size of a DSLR. It also had optical image stabilization (hence the "IS" in the name), which was a cutting-edge feature for a consumer camera at the time.

It was raining pretty hard when we arrived in Amsterdam. We ran from the train station to a bar across the street and had a beer while we waited for the rain to stop. Once it did, we exited onto a street that was lined with produce stands. Jacob started talking with one of the vendors and, coincidentally, the vendor's family owned an apartment on the same street that was available for rent. The apartment looked great and we agreed to rent it.

That night, we stepped out of the apartment to explore the city. The produce stands were gone. The buildings on the opposite side of the street had a bunch of rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows. Each room had a red light and a woman wearing lingerie. The apartment we had rented was adjacent to Amsterdam's red light district.

I pulled out my camera to document this discovery. Before I could raise the camera more than a few inches, the women in the windows started gesturing at me, angrily, and nearby pedestrians started yelling at me. Turns out, taking pictures in the red light district is strictly prohibited.

We walked around town and returned to the apartment later that night. Jacob worked out that we had a view of the red light district from a window in my bedroom. Well, we could see two of the women, from a distance, at an awkward angle. Mike was unimpressed and went back to his bedroom. Jacob yelled "OPTICAL IMAGE STABILIZATION!!!" as a battle cry, we got my camera, and spent the following 10 minutes trying to get a clear picture of the women. The resulting pictures were not good.

The resulting pictures were also stolen when my camera was stolen in Lisbon a couple weeks later. I wonder if the thieves looked at the pictures.

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