Tag: camera

I love my new camera.

Through the lavender
Through the lavender

For my birthday, Paul gave me  a new camera. I made the big decision to trade in both of my SLRs (an Olympus OM10 Quartz and a Canon 350D) and go for the fanciest point-and-shoot we could afford. That turned out to be a Canon G12.

I thought my old compact camera (a Pentax Optio A30) was pretty good, until it stopped talking to its batteries, but this one’s just fantastic. Its pictures in low light, its macro capabilities and its depth of colour is just lovely.

Raindrops on roses...
Raindrops on roses...

The only down side at the moment is that the RAW files won’t speak to my existing version of Adobe Lightroom, and I can’t afford to do an upgrade right now. This is particularly frustrating, as I specifically wanted a point-and-shoot camera that could create RAW files, and now I can’t use them!

So, these pictures are jpegs with minimal editing, mostly just a bit of cropping to improve the composition. Although one thing I do like about the jpeg settings on this camera is that one of them is a square format! You may have noticed that my preference is for square photographs, and it’s quite interesting taking them straight through the viewfinder rather than cropping them afterwards.

Shiny beetle
Rosemary Leaf Beetle

This lovely little beetle was only about 1cm long, and the lavender he’s sitting on was swaying in the breeze. My old camera would have really struggled to catch him, but the G12 managed it perfectly!

These pictures were all taken in the garden where I work. I’m really pleased with the way the autumn light and colours have come out, exactly as I saw them.

Rosehip
Rosehip

The G12 is much bigger and heavier than my old Pentax, about twice the size. But it does fit into my handbag (just about!), so I’m carrying it about with me every day. Hopefully this will result in me remembering that I can now take nice photos whenever I like, without carrying a wrist-breaking SLR. I’ll upgrade my copy of Lightroom later (perhaps Paul will buy me the upgrade for Christmas!), and then I can have a proper look at the quality of the RAW files too.

It looks as though I’m going to have a lot of experimenting to do with this camera. I think it’s going to be fun!

Square Format

Frog

This is the big fat frog that hopped out from underneath the broken fence as we were pulling it down. He didn’t seem too keen to get out of our way – Paul had to rather unceremoniously pick him up and plop him down in next door’s plant pot!

This morning, whilst wandering around on Flickr, I joined a group for square format photographs. I tend to crop my nature photos into squares, so it seemed like an interesting place to look around and see what other people were doing.

In one of the discussion threads there was a conversation about square format digital cameras. That’s where I found out about the Rollieflex MiniDigi. It’s styled exactly like the original Rollei twin lens reflex camera, but it’s teeny-tiny! (Smaller than this frog, in fact.) Unfortunately it costs over £350, and the resolution’s only 3 megapixels, but it does look as though it would be fun to use. Also, cute!

(Not that “cute” is my primary criterion for choosing things. Of course not. “Does it come in pink?” is much more important. Obviously.)