My New Camera

My old camera on the left, the new one on the right.
(This photo taken with my mobile phone!)

As someone might remember (I don’t blame you if you don’t): Just before my unfortunate fall two weeks ago, I had been to buy a new camera; and I promised some more detail about that.

The new one is a Sony DSC HX80. Beforehand, online, I had been looking at a similar but slightly different one (also a Sony); but when I got to the store, I noticed this one on display next to it; and when comparing them, I found this one even more to my liking. And actually also sold at a slightly lower price.

You may think it looks very much like my old one – and you’re right. There were a few things wrong with my old one, though. The flash hasn’t been working since a couple of years back, and on top of that, during the past winter some dirt got stuck somewhere in the lenses so that I got a dark blurry spot appearing in all photos using zoom or macro.

I haven’t had all that much chance to get to know the new one yet, but I have tried it out on a few short walks, to make sure it survived the Fall. It seems to have come out of that adventure better than I did. (It was still in its box in my backpack when I tripped and fell.)

It has some technical advantages over my old one. Better zoom for one thing (30x optical zoom compared to 12.5); and both an optical viewfinder and a tiltable (‘selfie’) screen. It is still almost exactly the same size as my old one and only 40g heavier. So far I’m very pleased with it. Looking forward to exploring it more later on!

Unusual combination of rhododendron and (‘wild’) wood anemones in a flowerbed next to my building (last week).

The lilacs are in bloom.

And so are the horse chestnut trees (zoomed in)

And the many colourful azaleas in the old cemetery.

As for me, I’m afraid writing/typing for long is still painful. Evidently it will take some time to grow new skin on my arm/elbow… Four more nurse appointments booked over the next two weeks, to change bandages (which in this case I can’t manage myself). My minor wounds healed and most of the bruising gone, though!

I’ll be following some blogs using Feedly on my phone but may not feel up to much commenting.

Lots of resting lying down and listening to audio books just now!

The Fickleness of Early Spring

As I said a week ago:
”…spring in mid February is never to be trusted…”

Early this morning I woke up to a snowstorm. Before the plow had been round, the ground was covered in more white stuff than I’ve seen all winter. It soon turned back to rain though, and this evening it’s all been washed away again. The photo was taken at some point in between…

Meanwhile – not today, but last week, inspired by the sun – I put my spring/summer curtains back up in the kitchen …

… and also changed some decorations in the living room.

Alas tulips only last a week (at most). But I also bought a couple of flowering potted plants that will last a bit longer.

Some time a bit further on in spring I think I shall have to get a new camera. My little Casio is getting old and tired… (My blog, which remembers more than I do, informs me that I’ve had it since 2011.) The flash has not been working for a while, and lately it has started seeing black spots (or one) when zooming. I was very puzzled by this at first. For one thing, I have very similar black fuzzy floaters in my own eyes as well (from PVD)…! So it took me a while (not sure how long) to realize that the smudges I’d noticed in some recent winter photos were actually from inside the camera.

(In some photos it’s harder to spot than in others…)

Ah well. A good excuse to start looking around for a new camera when “proper” spring starts showing its colours…

December 8 – In the Dark

Feeling uninspired today. Also a bit frustrated because it seems that the flash on my camera has stopped working. Not that I use the flash much, even for indoors photography… But still! (Even less reason for it to go on strike, one might think.)

Ah well. I guess I may take it as an excuse to start thinking about getting a new camera, perhaps. Even if not immediately.

Anyway, there I was, feeling uninspired, and not knowing what to post about today. So turned back to the box of old drawings from my childhood. (See Dec 5.) Besides rabbits, it seems I was also into ghost stories. And beneath the picture above, there was a message written to my future self: Did you know that ghosts have “flashlight” eyes which they turn on when they are out scaring people, and want to see in the dark?

I have to confess I had completely forgotten.

Book Review: The Camera Fiend

Some time ago, Librarian posted a review of a book My Lord Duke by E.W. Hornung (1866-1921) – an author perhaps better known for his stories about a ‘gentleman thief’ by name of Raffles. At least that was the only ones in the bibliography that rang a little bell with me. I was also interested to learn that Hornung was brother-in-law to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

I went to browse titles by this author free for Kindle, and came across The Camera Fiend (from 1911). 

There’s just no getting away from those early 20th century cameras and photographers lately!!

This photo was used as prompt for Sepia Saturday this week.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/5890411469/

They also seem to turn up in every other book I read:
The House of Arden. The Secret Keeper. The Year After.

The intriguing thing about The Camera Fiend (besides the title) was that there was no introduction to it on Amazon (just a paragraph about the author) and not a single review. The only way to find out was to read.

So I did (this weekend). A little hesitant through the first chapter or two, not really having any clue at all what kind of book it was supposed to be. My first guess was to place it in the genre of humour, but soon the story started taking unexpected twists and turns, and that rather fast. Actually a lot of the charm lies in the surprise elements, and not knowing where it may be going next… So I don’t want to give away too much. But the further I read the more the plot thickened and I found it harder and harder to put the book down. (Today I just kept reading, except for a cold windy walk to the supermarket, and lunch.)

The main character is an asthmatic young man (the word teenager was not yet invented) by name of Tony “Pocket” Upton, on leave from boarding school for a couple of days to go into London to see a specialist doctor about his asthma medication. His intention to stay the night with friends does not turn out quite as planned… and trouble escalates in ways he’d never been able to imagine. Let it be enough to say that the story also involves a suspicious death or two, a professor interested in photography and spiritualism, a young girl, and a private investigator with assistant.

It was an entertaining read, and I think I’ll try more titles by this author.

Quotes:

You cannot sit up half your nights with asthma and be an average boy.

Pocket was not one of nature’s heroes, but he had an overwhelming desire to behave like one.

That is the worst of your conscientious ass; he takes his decision like a man; he means to stick to it like a sportsman; but he cannot help wondering whether he has decided for the best, and what would have happened if he had decided otherwise, and what the world will say about him as it is.

“I think that Dr [---] has the strangest power of any human being I ever heard of; he can make you do anything he likes, whether you like it yourself or not.”

Teaser Tuesday: Castles, Cameras and Brownies

I assure you that nobody would have known that the black and grey muddle on Elfrida's paper was meant to be a picture of a castle. Edred's was much more easily recognised, even before he printed "Arden Castle" under it in large, uneven letters. --- "There!" he said at last, "it's ever so much liker than yours." "Yes," said Elfrida, "but there's more in mine." "It doesn't matter how much there is in a picture if you can't tell what it's meant for," said Edred, with some truth.

From The House of Arden (1908)
by Edith Nesbit (1858-1924)
(Chapter VIII)

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

…

Critical of their attempts at drawing the ruins of the castle, the children come up with the idea of taking a Brownie (camera) with them back into the past. I don’t know yet how that turned out, because I haven’t read that far yet. I had to pause right there and go for a little (Wikipedia) excursion of my own. (Children? Camera? 1908?)

The first Brownie, introduced in February, 1900, was a very basic cardboard box camera with a simple lens that took 2¼-inch square pictures on 117 rollfilm. With its simple controls and initial price of $1, it was intended to be a camera that anyone could afford and use, hence the slogan, "You push the button, we do the rest." The camera was named after the popular cartoons created by Palmer Cox.

… Palmer Cox (1840 – 1924) was a Canadian illustrator and author, best known for The Brownies, his series of humorous verse books and comic strips about the mischievous but kindhearted fairy-like sprites.

(Click the image to read the book as html-file from www.gutenberg.org)

Okay, I think I’m getting a suspicion where Edith Nesbit may have got some of her inspiration from… (Rhymes, by the way, are also important in The House of Arden.)

Myself I’m getting more and more fascinated with my own time-travelling (by books as well as old family photographs and postcards) into the early 1900’s…

Gorillapod

I got a “Gorillapod” (small tripod with flexible legs) for my new camera. It weighs only 45 g, so even I can’t complain that’s  too heavy to drag around… ;) I think that even when not finding something to attach it to, it might sometimes be of help just as an extra handle to hold the camera steady when zooming or filming.

The Bird-Watching Has Begun

The bird-watching has begun! First thing I saw when I looked out of my window this morning was some big birds having breakfast on the lawn below. They behaved like pigeons but were much bigger than any pigeon I’m used to seeing here. 

So I grabbed my new camera and made my first daylight attempts to get acquainted with the new zoom… N.b. these shots were taken through the window (2nd floor) and the birds were probably 8-10 m from the house, and moving around. Well, at least I got a few shots good enough for identification, even if not super sharp. (These have been further cropped and edited in the computer.)  

 

Mystery solved: it must be the Common Wood Pigeon (Swedish: ringduva, Latin Columba Palumbus)…  It is however not so ‘common’ just here; it’s different from the pigeons we usually see in town (compare the ones in my recent post Pigeon Went A-Courting). The Common Wood Pigeon is larger (Wiki says 38-43 cm which fits my impression of these), grey with pinkish chest, white markings on neck and wing, and yellow beak.

Unfortunately we’re having a very wet day here today. In a little while I’m off to meet a friend for lunch and wondering how to dress to avoid getting soaked… Hmm.

New Camera

I’ve been thinking for over a year, perhaps two, about buying a new camera. Especially every time I’ve tried to zoom in a bird and ended up with results like this:

 

On the other hand I knew that if I got a big complicated camera with lots of lenses and stuff, for one thing I would find it too heavy to carry around with me, and for another no bird would have the patience to wait around until I’d figured out what setting to use!

However, while I’ve been thinking, digital cameras have evolved. This weekend a review in my local newspaper of the Nikon Coolpix S9100 caught my attention. (My old camera is a Nikon Coolpix 4600… ) So I went on to check out further details on the internet. But when I started comparing it to a few other similar ones within the same price range, there was another one that on the whole to me seemed even more interesting. And available in a technical outlet store within walking distance from where I live…

… I’m now waiting for the battery to load, so that I can start getting properly acquainted with my new …

 Casio EX-H30:

  

Whether I’ll be singing its praises soon or muttering over some unforeseen disadvantages remains to be seen!

This more or less sums up why I bought it:

* It’s nearly as small and light as my old Coolpix.
* Long life battery (up to 1000 images)
* 16.1 megapixels (my old one 4.0)
* 12.5x optical zoom, 18.8 single Super Resolution zoom
   (my old one 3x optical zoom)
* 24 mm wide angle
* HD video
* Panorama function
* Manual options for shutter speed and aperture
* Macro shots as close as 1 cm

What I guess will feel a bit strange to begin with is the lack of optical viewfinder. (My old Coolpix has one.) But that was the same with the other cameras I compared this one to. What made this one stand out compared to the others was the battery, the manual options, the panorama, and the 1 cm macro.

---

Ah. The battery seems to have loaded in four hours as promised.
Looking forward to getting started with the fun! :)