Last Christmas, I bought the kids a Fisher-Price Kid-Tough Waterproof Digital Camera.

It is the perfect camera for fledgling photographers in the 3-7 year-old range.

It has a flash, a simple interface, and comes with all the tools you need to transfer their photographic masterpieces to your computer. The image quality isn’t that great, but the camera is (so far) indestructible. Considering the beating it gets from my son, that is a critical quality. *Note – since I bought ours, they have also waterproofed the camera! Awesome.*

Every now and then, they go off and set up still-life pictures, as well as inventive trick photography.

Trick photography case in point: One night, as I cooked dinner, they were playing in the yard with the camera. They came running in, gasping for breath and shouting that they saw a real giraffe in the back yard. I looked at them and asked, “A real giraffe?”

“Yes! Mom! We can prove it!”

With that, they showed me their astonishing proof.

Funny... I never saw any news reports about an escaped giraffe!

This picture led me to think instantly of the famous photo of Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster. I feigned shock, the three of us tried to figure out what a hungry lost giraffe might like for dinner, and then all had a good laugh.

A carefully arranged still-life.

I think this camera is well worth the investment. We have a lot of fun uploading their pictures to Walgreens, then printing them and putting them in albums. An amateur photographer myself, it excites me greatly to see them developing their own techniques.