Canon G12 – eternal magpie

Hello Snail.

Today I had rather a long wait for the bus home from work (and there aren’t any buses to my new house on a Sunday, which is going to be awkward), so I decided to play around with the camera again while I was waiting. Hello snail!

Expecting my camera to be all “no, I’m not focussing anywhere you want, hahaha”, I was pleasantly surprised when it decided to prove me wrong.

(Yes, I realise my camera is inanimate. I don’t think that prevents it from having moods, or trying to thwart me at every possible opportunity.)

This little bit of lichen is about a centimetre across. About the same size as the snail’s shell, in fact. And today, my camera had no problem at all taking this picture.

Or this one. In low light, and in the rain, no less.

Goodbye snail.

Still struggling with the camera

Today started as a tired, sore, germy day (again!), which could easily have lapsed into watching rubbish on tv and malingering on the sofa. So I decided to take the camera for a very short walk, so I would have at least got out of the house and done something.

As you can see, I’m still really struggling to get the dratted machine to focus where I want it to. I love the picture above – two rosemary leaf beatles in the lavender in my front garden. But is is actually in focus? Anywhere? No, it is not. And this is the only picture I managed to get where the camera didn’t categorically insist on focussing on the background instead of the dratted thing right in front of the dratted lens. Read on, for more of the same.

This was supposed to be a lovely juxtaposition between the shiny arch of the padlock, and the rusted texture of the chain. What I wanted to focus on was the place where the three links overlap. Would the camera do that? No.

This one, on the other hand, came straight out of the camera first time! Lovely depth of field, focussed exactly where I wanted it. Brilliant! Would the camera do it again, so I could have a choice of shots? No.

Okay, this one I do like. I’m less bothered that the petal tip closest to the lens is out of focus, because that means you can see the texture on the inside of the petals. Who knew flowers were hairy? Now you do.

And this one – lovely. Straight out of the camera. Automatic macro mode. Focus on the water droplets. Exactly what I wanted. The camera almost had me lulled into a false sense of security…

…until it needed more than twenty shots before it would focus on this leaf, and not on the dratted trees in the background. (I may have resorted to pointing at the leaf, and hissing through clenched teeth “IT’S RIGHT THERE, YOU STUPID CAMERA”.)

And then it was fine again. Aren’t the colours in this lichen amazing?

Dear Camera, No.
Really, what were you thinking? You do seem to have tried to focus on the raindrops on this blade of grass, but sadly you have failed. Even at 2736 pixels across, I can’t work out where the point of focus is in this photo.

Thankfully this one, being almost entirely flat, was no trouble at all. Phew.

I suppose, in the great scheme of things, if all I want these photos for is to print them out at 10cm square and stick them into a scrapbook, it really doesn’t matter whether or not they’re great works of art in their own right. They’re just a means of capturing a little bit of something that I can use for inspiration later on. But in that case, why on earth did I bother to trade in two SLRs (one film, one digital) for a not-very-compact camera with a lot of manual functions, if none of them will actually do what I want? I’m beginning to wonder whether I might have been better off buying a small, cheap, very compact little camera – or maybe one of the new ones that can wirelessly synch straight to Flickr and Facebook.

As it turned out, the best part of my little walk today was something that I could never have captured on camera, and I’m very glad I didn’t try. The lake was so quiet that when I walked down onto one of the fishing bays, a Great Crested Grebe turned out to be about a foot away from me, the closest I’ve ever seen one! And as it quickly swam away, its path was crossed by the turquoise flash of a kingfisher flying right in front of it. Perfect.

A Calming Walk

This morning I was feeling particularly fibromyalgy (of course it’s a real word), and didn’t have the attention span or strength of body to carry on with my sewing. I did a few bits and bobs on the computer, but was gradually becoming more and more cross with myself for being ill. So it seemed sensible to get out, and go for a walk.

CAUTION: There is one picture of a spider in this post, a bit further down.

It was a very slow walk (half a mile in an hour and a half), but I had to keep stopping to look at small things. This fuzzy fellow is the caterpillar of the Buff Tip Moth, and he had a lot of friends who were steadily devouring a very small oak tree.

This is not an oak leaf (unhelpfully, I can’t remember what it is now), but I love the way you can see the cell structure from underneath. This is exactly the sort of thing I want to look at with my microscope, although I haven’t yet got around to either collecting a bunch of stuff to look at, or dragging my netbook around the lake with me.

I don’t know what type of spider this is, because I’m sufficiently arachnophobic that I don’t want to have to look up lots of different pictures of spiders to find out. If anyone could tell me, that would be lovely! Despite the slightly gruesome nature of the spider wrapping up its lunch (and the scariness of the spider itself), I thought this was rather a magical picture, with the web framed by leaves and little flecks of light twinkling through from the background.

One problem I am finding with this camera (Canon Powershot G12) is its general unwillingness to focus where I want it to unless it’s set entirely to automatic. Even then, it sometimes takes a bit of fiddling about. I usually take photos in Aperture Priority mode, because I like shots like this with a very shallow depth of field. Trying to combine that with macro shots though, argh, there were times when I could cheerfully have thrown the camera into the lake. And don’t even talk to me about the manual focus – that was even worse than repeatedly half-pressing the button and hoping for the best! So the vast majority of these photos were taken with the camera set to fully automatic, because I simply didn’t have the patience to fiddle.

Once again, more unidentified insects. I saw yellow spots all over the top of the leaf, and pointed the camera underneath to see what I could find. This is another one where I should have brought the leaf home with me, to check it out under the microscope! But I didn’t really want whatever those insects are to hatch out in my Shed. Or die because I’d taken the leaf off the tree.

I think this is a fragment of a pigeon’s egg. It’s very common to find them on the paths around the lake. There are A LOT of wood pigeons in the woods (unsurprisingly!), and as well as magpies and other predators finding the eggs tasty, pigeons will also push eggs out of the nest if they’re infertile. I like the way you can see the delicate cracks showing up in the membrane of this little piece.

And finally, more insect-related weirdness. The fluffy spiky things on this dog rose are moss galls, or “Robin’s pincushions”. They’re caused by a wasp laying eggs into the bud of the rose, which causes the cellular structure of the plant to change. The same thing happens to oak trees, and I know that oak galls can be used for dyeing. Apparently you can use these rose galls too, after they’ve dried out and the wasp larvae have vacated them. Not sure I’d fancy trying to collect them though – all the galls on this plant were a very long way up!

I know the weather’s turned a bit wet, but think I need to make it my mission to get outdoors and take a lot more photos. I’ve neglected my camera a lot this year, mainly thanks to spending more time at work since the spring, and then being too tired or too busy to go wandering around in the woods. I’d also like to get some actual prints made, so that I can stick them into sketchbooks and use them as inspiration for other work. Time to get uploading to Photobox I think, unless anybody’s got a recommendation for somewhere different?

Tag: Canon G12

Hello Snail.

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Still struggling with the camera

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A Calming Walk

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