Tag: photos

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!

So much for summer

Raindrops

Well, it’s the middle of July – the point of the year at which I’d usually be complaining about my Shed turning into a sauna, and my skin turning lobster-coloured.

Raindrops

Instead I’m sitting here in the dark, with the heater on, looking out at the rain.

So much for summer.

Maiden Erlegh Lake

We’re still trying to get outside as much as we can though, dashing out for short walks between the rain showers.

Just as we were heading home last night, we saw two foxes in the fields. My camera couldn’t manage to catch them in the twilight, but it was lovely to watch them for a while.

Summer Walk

Hydrangea

It finally felt a little bit like summer, for about an hour at lunchtime today. I’ve been ill for most of this week, and cooped up indoors, so I thought I’d brave a little walk.

Poppy

The hydrangea above, and these poppies, are in the garden of my local church. It’s a brand new building with a brand new garden, but a few small plants are finally starting to establish themselves.

Poppy heads

I do love my little camera. It’s a Pentax Optio A30, about five years old, and it took this picture all by itself, on the super macro setting. The only post-processing I did was to crop the image into a square.

Sadly it’s just about on its last legs (it’s terrible in low light, and barely speaking to the batteries), which means I’m going to have to replace it. I’m not looking forward to that, partly because I can’t afford a new camera, and partly because this one’s been so lovely that I’m completely spoiled by it.

Hogweed

This hogweed (I think!) grows at the side of the path down to the underpass.

Hogweed

It gives me ideas for silver clay jewellery, with this lovely sculptural shape pressed into a pendant. Or perhaps a lovely embroidery, with the buds made up of french knots.

White cornflower

These cornflowers have both appeared in my front garden. Who knew you could have white cornflowers? The only ones I’ve ever known have been blue. I sowed three mixed packets of wildflower seeds, and this is the only little patch that’s come up. A square foot of daisies and cornflowers amongst the thyme.

Cornflower

Hopefully they’ll seed themselves, so that next year we have a front garden full of these little gems.

Walk in the woods

Walk in the woods

Yesterday evening I received a text from Sarah at Skycarrots, asking whether we’d like to go for a walk. Of course the answer was yes, so the three of us grabbed our cameras and wandered into the woods.

Walk in the woods

The light was absolutely beautiful (when the sun tentatively appeared), and I found lots of places that made me think of ideas for my doll-related project.

My little camera behaved remarkably well, considering how much it dislikes working in low light. The photo below hasn’t been edited at all, and I’m really pleased with it.

(The two above have been edited in Lightroom, to make the light in the pictures a little closer to what we could see in real life.)

Walk in the woods

We also walked along to where the blackthorn trees are, and spotted lots of other fruit along the way. Blackberries, plums, cherries and sumac (a new one to me) are going to be plentiful this year, by the looks of things.

24/06/2012

I have so many books now about foraging for edible and medicinal plants. I must start to keep a notebook of where these things are in our local area, so I can recognise them when I don’t have Sarah around to identify everything for me!

Tumblr Thursday: April Archive

This is everything I uploaded to Tumblr in April.

You can see the archive in more detail, here.

Sometimes Tumblr takes me by surprise. I use the queue functionality to collect images that I like, and then allow the site to automatically post a certain number of images each day. This means that I never quite know exactly what I’m going to find there, and sometimes images pop up that I’d forgotten about.

I like to think of it as a kind of endless digital scrapbook. I used to collect pictures from magazines and stick them into a book. Sometimes I wouldn’t look at them again for months, and I’d be taken by surprise at the images I’d chosen. Sometimes themes would become apparent, sometimes there’d be duplicates. Sometimes I’d wonder what on earth I’d been thinking of, when I’d collected certain images that somehow no longer appealed.

There’s something very satisfying about collecting what appear to be very disparate images, and then looking at them in a large group like this. It becomes very easy to spot trends in colours, or shapes, or textures, and I find that very useful when I’m stuck for inspiration.

 

I used to cross-post every image from Tumblr to Twitter, but quickly found that my “proper” tweets were being lost amongst the noise. If you have a tumblr account yourself and would like to follow me, you can find me here. If you follow blogs via an RSS feeder, there’s an RSS link too. Otherwise, I’ll keep posting archive pictures like this, as often as I remember!

 

Walk in the woods

Web

I had to go out to the Post Office this morning, and it started off as a very misty day. I thought I might be able to take some photos of trees dramatically silhouetted against the sky, so I took the camera with me. As it turned out I’d brought along the macro lens, which isn’t so good for dramatic trees, so I took lots of photos of little details of things instead.

Oak leaves

This was supposed to be a picture of a beautiful green shoot springing forth vigorously from the ground… but the plant was out of focus, so I cropped it out. Can you tell I have a lot to learn about the macro lens? Look at the lovely texture of these leaves though!

Blossom

Still very misty, and quite dark as I walked into the woods. If you look closely (or click the picture to see a larger version on Flickr), you can see tiny dewdrops all over the petals.

Acorn

Buried treasure! This acorn had been recently unearthed, but apparently deemed not good enough for eating.

Hole

I do like a good hole to peep through. This one made me want to go back to the doll that I never finished making. In my imagination, she looks great perched in this tree.

Buds

Look! It’s spring! Finally.

Catkins

I must admit, I had real trouble getting the macro lens to focus where I wanted it to. Left on automatic, it was zooming in and out all over the place. This one was done using manual focus, but I’m so used to using the big screen on the back of my point and shoot camera that I find the viewfinder too tiny to see through properly. (That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.)

Crocus with dewdrop

Sometimes things worked out pretty nicely though – I didn’t even see the tiny dewdrop on the end of the crocus leaf until I looked at this image on the computer.

Bud

By the time I was heading back home it was a beautifully sunny morning. I must get out with the camera more often. It was so satisfying to take a very slow walk and really look at everything around me.

Walk in the woods

Unfortunately I underestimated how much mud I might bring back with me, otherwise I’d have worn my walking boots!

Feathers and Fur

Feathers & Fur
Peregrine

I haven’t taken any bird photos for a while… but today was Paul’s birthday trip, which was a visit to Feathers and Fur, a local falconry centre. It’s a tiny place, inside a garden centre, and a friend had told us about a Groupon offer on their Hands On falconry sessions.

Feathers & Fur
Willow, barn owl

We were incredibly lucky to have the entire two hour session to ourselves, and even though it’s apparently not the right time of year for falconry (the birds should be out hunting and getting fat), everyone behaved beautifully.

Sadie was really friendly and taught us lots of things about the birds, their environment, and how she raises and looks after them. Her enthusiasm was infectious, and we laughed for most of the session. It turns out that watching a barn own swallow his lunch whole is somewhat inelegant, but absolutely hilarious!

Feathers & Fur
Kestrel

I used the 70mm macro lens this time, and I’m really pleased with the photos I managed to take. I went for portraits rather than action pictures (Paul has some gorgeous ones of the owls in flight), and am thrilled with the detail on the image below. The snow made the light a bit weird and I was worried about the photos being over-exposed, so I dropped the ISO down to 400. I think that was a mistake, as some of the images are darker than I’d like, but I definitely had a higher success rate than I have in the past!

Feathers & Fur
Billie Jean, eagle owl

You can see the rest of my photos over on Flickr. If you’re feeling sensitive, one of them’s a bit gruesome (the aforementioned barn owl lunch), but hey, everybody needs to eat.

We’ll definitely be going back and booking another session – probably a dedicated photography one next time. Sadie took some great shots with Paul’s camera, and understands how to position you to get the pictures you want. Although it’s always nice to have the opportunity to have the birds fly to you, so another session like the one we had today would be great.

(Note to self: No, you can’t have a barn owl. Really.)

Paradise Wildlife Park

A couple of weeks ago we went to Paradise Wildlife Park.

My photos are here.

Thanks to a special offer pointed out to us by a friend, we had tickets for a “Monkey Tour”, which turned out to be absolutely brilliant.

We got to meet ruffed lemurs, who were very laid back, and like to be tickled under the arms. Also they were keen on sunbathing, and when something startles them they’re VERY LOUD. We got to feed dried apricots to golden-cheeked gibbons, who were very appreciative, and have very soft little hands. We were given a guided tour of the littlest primates (tamarins and marmosets, mostly), some of whom shared an enclosure with the world’s happiest sloth (bless him!) and a little armadillo. SO CUTE. Steve, the Head of Primates, suggested that we might like to smell the armadillo, so we did. He smelled a little bit like cheesy crisps. Adorable.

The last part of the tour was to go in and actually feed the ring-tailed lemurs, which was AWESOME. As long as you’ve got food, they’re quite happy to leap all over you and scoff it out of your hands. They don’t like to be stroked, but you inevitably touch them, and they’re so soft. A baby lemur held onto my thumb with both of his little hands. Awwww. I was very sad when we ran out of banana and the lemurs lost interest in us.

We also saw the most evil emu in the world ever, some Mara, who look like a very odd cross between a little deer and a massive guinea pig, and a lynx who reminded us of Skycarrots‘ cat. Oh, and we learned that reindeer antlers are soft, gibbons can kill you (which is why we fed them through the bars), and squirrel monkeys are evil.

Paradise was a fabulous place. Brilliantly geared up for kids, but not in a boring-for-adults kind of a way. I very heartily recommend it.

Tuppence a Bag

Feeding the Lorikeets

Way back in February, on our way home from Devon, we stopped off at Bristol Zoo.

I took a few photos, as usual, but I wasn’t feeling very well that day so I wanted to try and concentrate on seeing as much as possible and having a good time. I love anywhere that you can actually walk in amongst the animals, so getting to feed the lorikeets was the highlight of my day. You pay £1 for a little cup of nectar, stand in the designated feeding area, and noisy little parrots come and land all over you. Brilliant!

There was also a lemur enclosure that you could walk through, where we met ringtailed and mongoose lemurs and a bird forest. (More about that later.) There were also the most adorable fruitbats, but being February they’d wisely decided to stay indoors!

I loved the Twighlight area, which featured several aye-ayes, a not-very-slow loris, and the tiniest deer I’d ever seen. So cute! I also spent a long time failing to get a decent photo of a hilariously grumpy-looking chameleon, and laughing at a tern with a very dignified moustache.

I wouldn’t normally recommend going to the zoo on a freezing cold day in February, much less the first weekend of half term, but we really enjoyed ourselves.

Down in Devon

Crow flying across the beach

Last weekend we drove down to Devon, to visit Paul’s family.

We stopped at Paignton seafront, where we played a dancing game on the pier, took lots of photos underneath the pier, and chased a big crow who was trying to break open an enormous shellfish by dropping it on our car! I am full of admiration for the crow for having learnt how to do this, but less impressed that he decided to throw things at our windscreen. Thankfully he didn’t break it, but I do wonder how many tourists return from the beach to find their cars vandalised!

After Paignton we went to Totnes, where we found a proper vintage clothing shop called Revival that almost caused me to go into shock the moment I walked through the door. Paul managed to dissuade me from buying a beautiful red tailcoat, just because the silk lining in the sleeves was completely shattered and the lapels also needed replacing or re-covering. I wasn’t certain how old it was (there was no label), but it was beautifully made. The pad stitching under the lapels was fantastically neat, and there were pockets in the tails, and the buttonholes in the cuffs were all functional. And it still had all of its original buttons!

Damn, I wish I’d bought it.
Mind you, whilst I could have replaced the damaged parts of the jacket, and made the sleeves an inch shorter, I didn’t fancy taking it apart sufficiently to make it short enough in the waist. So I probably would have ended up never wearing it, and eventually selling it on Ebay for less than it would have cost me to buy and restore it. So it’s probably just as well I left it behind.

Probably.