bunn | Entries tagged with camera

Yesterday I drove into Gunnislake to take my car in to have its various ailments fixed, then walked back home through the woods with the hounds. The foxgloves are coming to the end of their blooming, but wow, there are a lot of them.

When I got my car back, I was pleased. Grey door looks a little odd, but the window works again and I also have a new battery so it actually starts and can drive places! (My car standards are so low :-D )

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I also made an impulse buy of a new second hand camera on ebay that I can't really afford but what the hell. It's a Sony A6000. Am very excited!

Have a zeitgeisty moment I saw on Tumblr: 2,292 Plants Fill the Audience in Opening Performance at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu

The cinemas are due to re-open here in the UK. I wonder if enough people will want to go to them. I can't say I fancy it. Although the number of cases and deaths has dropped from the peaks of April and May, the last couple of weeks look more like 'numbers have stabilised' than 'continue to fall' to me.

Um. Things that have happened. right then.

The car window that was fixed has broken again due to internal conflicts with the door opening mechanism whatsit. I did ask when I picked up the car from the garage and they told me the door and window had quarrelled, whether they were likely to do so again? They promised not. They were wrong.

Hmph. I now have a solid wooden wedge keeping the window up again while the garage scours ebay for a second set of window parts, and a new door-thingummy. I hope they can replace both together this time, and restore harmony to the Door.

I finally got around to assembling the Fidget Board I have been making. This was solicited by a local nursing home which cares for dementia patients: apparently a Thing now is to fix a bunch of knobs, switches, clips, hinges etc to a board, which is then left around in the lounges etc, and gives the residents something untaxing but occupying to do with their hands. I thought this seemed like a great use for some of the many 'That Will Come In Handy Some Day!' items I have piled in the utility room.

It was harder work than I had expected putting it all together though, because it seemed like I had 999 partial... things. Objects. Artifacts. Gadgets. Hardware. Wood... bits. Very few of which fitted neatly together. I ended up having to carve a plug-hole for my nice shiny metal plug on a chain, for example, because I assume that we either used the hole that the plug came with, or maybe there wasn't a hole? Who knows, that would have been years ago. YEARS I have been hoarding that plug on its shiny chain, and probably a year I have been hoarding the spare shelf that came with my Art Stuff shelves, that I used for the board bit. But now I have Done Something With It, and shortly I shall say farewell to it forever, which cannot be a bad thing.

I have photographed a lot of roleplaying games recently, which I rather enjoy. We seem to have moved now to a status where I am doing most of the shop photography and Pp is doing the data entry and stuff that requires Deep Lore about Roleplaying History. New (to us) roleplaying games are being added at a rate of knots and a goodly number of people are buying them. This is good.

The cats are very happy at the moment, and Gothmog and Fankil spend a lot of time wrestling and boxing and doing other cute things. Sometimes Theo joins in (Fankil really likes Theo, though I think he's wisely wary of Theo getting overexcited and hence too rough). I would take pictures of this, only the automatic lens on my camera has failed and taking photos of wrestling cats in poor light using a manual lens seems a bit fiddly. Maybe later in the year,

Although Theo failed his final exam at Dog School, because he absolutely would not lie down on command (he knows the command. He just didn't feel like doing it when there were puppies around to look at), I have none the less declared him done for now on the dog training front. We may start lessons again in September. But he does know all the basics, and I just need to practice practice practice on defeating distractions, and that will be easier if I just take him places to practice rather than to classes, I think. He is currently 8-9ish months, so he's really at maximum distractability at the moment. He is getting better at bringing me his squeaky walrus to throw instead of humping my leg, but there's still work to do there.

Let's have an art dump of recent arts. I seem to be painting quite a lot at the moment, which is partly because I'm feeling a bit tense and painting is a good release for that.

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And Finally! I am offering art in both the Fandom Trumps Hate and Fandom For Australia charity auctions, and to my extreme delight, someone has actually bid on my Fandom for Australia offer! Two people! Woohoo!

But I am suddenly exhausted from typing all that, so I shall simply link to this tumblr post about that rather than pasting it all in.

Happy Easter!

I have taken about 999 photos of various expeditions I keep meaning to at least mention here but in the meanwhile, I shall just note that my sister has been visiting from Canada, and so yesterday we first went for a Rosie-Led Walk, in which Rosie led us Up and Up until there was no more Up available and then we had great difficulty persuading her to go back down again. But eventually we got her to go back to the river, which was much cooler and very pleasant, and while we were there, we saw some dippers and a pair of distant but definite kingfishers.

And then in the evening we went out on the river at Wacker Quay, since at long last the sun is not only shining but the wind has dropped too. Our canoe is not much fun in wind. We paddled up to St Germans, which has a handy little slipway where we were able to swap paddlers over so all three of us got a chance to paddle. Today my shoulders are a bit tired but it was fun. Very calm and quiet with huge reflecting hazy skies.

No photos of that because although I did remember my camera, I forgot it didn't have a card in it. Oh well. I snapped some pics on my sister's camera, anyway, which is one of those superzooms, though I imagine those will not come to light till she gets home and rummages through them. It was interesting to try out the amazing zoom, though I prefer to have a bit more control over what the camera does, it wasn't easy to work out even how to adjust white balance, since it's designed very much as a point-and-shoot.

Oh, and we saw a fox wandering through a field, from the canoe.

Back in... 1997, I think, my grandmother died, leaving a house stuffed to the brim with a lifetime's carefully sorted junk. We all took a few bits and pieces and then a house clearance company was called in to deal with the rest of it. My father in law, who has an interest in photography, took some of my grandfather's old cameras.

Fast forward twenty-odd years, and now my in-laws have developed a newfound interest in having a loft that is not stuffed full of old junk that someone thought looked interesting...( Read more... )

I have been experimenting with my new Sony A5000. At the moment I'm sticking to using the lens that came with it, a 16-50mm pancake lens. It is absurdly small and light wearing that lens - very pocketable, at least into a coat pocket.
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( Long boring post about new camera and toys for it. )

The walk: The sun was shining, and although some of the trees have lost their leaves, there are enough leaves left to make good reflections in the river. The trees that still have leaves are mostly beech and sweet chestnut, which are both trees with good colour, although there were a few oaks still be-leaved too.

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The whinge:
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Finally, here is an article explaining how to turn Barbie dolls into Weeping Angels.

( Blue light )

( Bee smugness )
( Manual focus lenses... )

1) Apparently in our house the answer to the eternal question: 'there's a rat in the kitchen what amma gonna do?' is 'catch it using the two-wellie-boot technique, escort it, enbooted, up the lane through the stygian darkness until the torch begins to die, then turf it out'. The Deliverer of Rats was Yama Bungle. I hope he's not going to make it a habit.
( 2, 3, 4 : The Unsuccessful Preserves )
5) It was Mollydog's twelfth birthday on Friday. Everydog had Birthday Bones to celebrate. She celebrated by haring about like a mad loon, but it was pouring with rain so I did not manage to photograph her. Here she is today instead, practicing her levitating.
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6) Although I am still very in love with my ancient manual focus lenses, I put the autofocus lens back on the Nex3, and experimented with using different types of autofocus now that I am generally more used to the camera. The spot focus mode seems to deliver the best results for the kind of photos I want to take. Here is Flash Whuppet running like a little deer:

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I threatened to post more photographs taken while testing out the new camera, and now that threat has been realised...

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Current Mood: colourful

I was going to take some pics to go with this review, but I've not got round to taking them off the camera yet, so thought I might as well get on and post it while I was thinking about it...

( Nex3 )

Current Mood: thoughtful

I finally chose a camera! I've been reading up and wibbling over this for months and months and months and months.

But I've finally made up my mind, and gone for a Sony Nex3 with an 18-55mm lens, on the grounds that it has a big DSLR sensor and a teeny weeny body, so should offer good quality but still be small enough that I'm actually likely to take it out and about with me, (and it's also cheaper than any of the other options!)

I hope it turns out to be a good decision! On the plus side, if I'd been more decisive, I'd have bought a camera ages ago before this one came out, so YAY for indecisiveness.

I did wonder whether to get the Nex 5, which is basically the same camera but with HD video, IR connectivity, and a metal rather than plastic case for a hundred quid more. But I don't think I need HD video, and although I liked the last camera I owned with a metal case - it felt more solid and stylish than my current plastic one - I found that it was rather heavy and easy to drop. My current camera is plastic, and it's undeniably just that bit less likely to slip through your fingers, and easier to handle on cold days. And a hundred quid is not to be sniffed at!

I'm thinking that if all goes well, I may still eventually buy another compact ultrazoom as well rather than stick a monstrous zoom lense onto this tiny camera, so as to have the zoom available if I want it. I think I will miss the big zoom, so am planning to keep the Panasonic FZ7 as well for the time being.

Current Mood: surprised

I resisted temptation well last year, and never did buy a Panasonic G1.

Now I'm glad I didn't, as I have a new lust object, the Panasonic GF1 which is even smaller than the G1 and seems to have tidied up a few loose ends, and in particular, performs gratifyingly well on speed compared to the Olympus Pen which is its closest competitior (I like taking photos of things that move about a lot like birds and running dogs, so that's important)

Buying one will however require me to understand interchangable lenses, which I've not previously needed to worry about - as the GF1 comes with either a 14-45mm lens smaller aperture, or a 20mm lens. The 20 mm lens is well reviewed, and comes in a nice pancake format that would make it nice and easily portable, but has no image stabilisation, a fixed focal length, so no zoom, and puts the price up a bit too. Bigger maximum aperture: better in low light tho. Current camera sucks rather in low light.

Or I could go for the default 14-45mm zoom lens, which comes with image stabilisation and can zoom, but isn't so wee and has a smaller aperture, so might be closer to what I've already got.

I could add this 45-200mm which would probably be rather good for high speed wildlife/dog pics (I think).

Or I could give up in confusion, and stick with my current 4 year old compact ultrazoom, which to be fair, usually does a pretty decent job by my fairly low standards. I've been reading reviews and information about how to choose lenses, but they all seem to focus on deciding what you want to photograph, and my photos tend to swerve wildly from action to landscape to portrait to closeup...!

Current Mood: confused

I have had my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7 for three years now. It still works. It's still a pretty good, reliable camera. It takes decent action shots, excellent close-ups, has a good range of standard modes and if feeling industrious and perfectionist, I can improve results further by manually setting almost everything. I recently bought it a new set of batteries, some of which I haven't even used yet. OK, I am stuck with the one lens, but it's a pretty good one for the size. So, really, I don't need a new camera.

Alas, I foolishly wandered near a camera review website today. And I fell horribly in love with the new(ish) Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 - it seems to be the step forward in terms of a really small DSLR-quality camera that I've been looking for. It's about the same size as my current camera, but with a bigger (and swappable) lens, and using an adaptor, can also take all these lenses. The reviews say that it focuses as fast as any conventional SLR (important for all those running greyhound shots!).

It's got no video, but then I shoot video once in a blue moon. And as a final sign that it is made for me, it comes in red and blue as well as the standard boring camera colours! I love blue or red gadgets!

WANT!!! WANT before we go to Iceland and have exciting new things to photograph! Unfortunately it costs roughly 500quid that I do not have. Woe is me!

Oh yes, and if I hadn't idiotically driven my car into a wall for no good reason I could probably just-about-not-quite afford to buy it. Wail! Curse!