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Sunday, July 22, 2007

Up close and personal

After blogging yesterday about how, perhaps, my long time in coming patience could be one of the positive things to come out of this whole cancer deal; the little light bulb went off in my head. Why not go outside with my relatively new camera and tackle this macro/closeup issue. I'm on my third digital camera and although it's not super expensive, it's far more sophisticated than my first one which cost a grand total of 80 bucks if you were a member of something or another in 1999 (it was VERY cheap and limited). However, I got my best flower close-ups with that camera and have never felt as comfortable with any other digital camera I've owned, in terms of close ups.
I knew that there was no way that piece of junk first digital camera was really superior for close-ups. I couldn't even take one digital photo, with the first digital camera, at the resolution I can take hundreds and more photos with my current digital camera. My new camera has a ton of setting I haven't learned but it can also be switched to manual so it's more like the old 35 mm camera Bill got in the 1970s in Japan which was great. Not only that, later I can buy an adapter so I can add removable telephoto and wide angle lenses and then it really will be similar to the old camera I used until I went to digital ones. However, all this begs the issue that although, even without the add on lenses, having a much better telephoto lens built in to catch those flighty birds, than what I had with my early digital cameras, is great; and being able to take landscape shots without losing all the details is great; when it has come to close ups, I haven't been able to do as well as I did with the 80 buckaroo ultra cheapo digital camera. Yesterday afternoon, I went outside with my camera and I played. I still have a ways to go but voila, I think I have shown a little improvement with one session of fiddling with all the settings I didn't understand on my most recent camera. The last picture cracks me up. Talk about hiding your light under a barrel. I have quite a few gerber daisies that aren't hiding underneath the leaves but that one seemed to hold the most mystery. Or perhaps it's just a shy blossom. I'm rather proud of that plant because when my daughter was in 10th grade, a car pool mom gave it to me as a thank you for taking extra carpool pick ups for her. It was a nice little potted plant which I took out of the pot after it stopped blooming and discovered it was 3 plants. I divided them, planted them and they have come back each spring. They've even spread out a bit and 3 of the zillions of seeds they dropped, gave me 3 more plants so I have 6 healthy gerber daisy plants in my back garden for the price of a few extra car pool trips. Not a bad trade. Especially since I've had them now for over 7 years. Every spring I hold my breath unable to believe they will really come back but so far so good and we've had some of our most intense winters in that time period. The past few winters have been mild but as I recall 2001 through 2003 were amongst our most severe winters ever. I realize it's all relative but when you live in the southeast, 20 inches of snow at one time is an event. We're still talking about that one 6 years later.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

the photos are bright and clear..gorgeous..just what kind of camera do you have? Mine is a cannon S3 and we can add lenses but don't have any extras yet. I just may take a photogrophy class at the community center or local college. Maybe, maybe not..it might take the fun out of it for me.

I've been wondering about your drought there..I always thought you got a lot of rain in that area..so what's the hold up? don't you get thunderstorms and like? Remember, it's me full of questons as alwys. hahahah
sue

Carver said...

Hi Sue,

I have a canon PowerShot A610. I should take a photography class but I keep thinking I'll get it from trial and error. That would work if I'd start learning from my mistakes but . . . I am trying to pay more attention though, starting with yesterday. It's about time!

We finally did get some thunderstorms last week which helped a lot. We're in much better shape at the moment and I collected a lot of water in 10 gallon cans that I've covered and can use, as well as in two large washtubs. Ah the advantages of not getting my gutters cleaned out yet. Carver