New camera ideas ...

25 August

The other day I went through the number of lines I follow on Twitter and ditched a load. As I’ve said before I do like real ale, but I have also said that for some months now neither of us are drinking booze of any kind. The lines I ditched were all real ale related ad guess what, my Twitter feed has halved now. The ones that are left are writing or photography based and they are much more interesting to read.

Sunday Jan went out shopping and came back with a Kile (didn’t know Asda sold them), but he’s here now for a week. So yesterday Jan helped his mum Sam to move the rest of their stuff from their rented house to her mums place. She left here around 9.45 and didn’t get back till just after 5pm. Jan didn’t know there was so much to be done. Anyway, it was up to me to find something to keep Kile happy while she was out. That was easy, two Parry Hotter DVDs and three Tremors DVDs. As I liked all of them I didn’t get round to doing me blog, as you no doubt noticed … sorry guys n gals.

My copy of NPhoto arrived yesterday, issue 50 so they have added more pages and come up with 50 prizes to give away in celebration. Another idea is the 50 comments from famous masters of photography with advice in how to use those comments in today’s work with digital imaging.

The mag runs an article every month where a top pro snapper takes an ‘apprentice,’ a reader who has applied to take part in an effort to improve their camera skills. This month the lucky reader is a South African who spent three days in Botswana on a wildlife safari. But the end of her three days was producing pro quality shots on her D3100. One here Hot Shots was a tight crop of two adult elephants with a young in front of them, playing in water. The light was brilliant, the focus spot on, the impact on the viewer was huge.

Of course, the apprentice is given help to improve their photography and with the story appearing in the mag, readers get to learn from it too. What have I learned? Well, first off is to increase my ISO when I’m shooting wild life. The idea there, even in the African sun is to ensure that you don’t miss shots because an increased ISO means you can increase your shutter speed. That in turn opens up the aperture to keep a clean background. The next thing for me was using the AF-L button on the back of the camera and thereby continuously focusing on your subject. I know that button but have never used it. Both of these I shall be putting into practice when we got out later this week.

Which brings me to today’s photo … 

A red flower in one of large displays in town.

And today’s one-liner …

 If we don't care that Jimmy cracked corn, why do we still sing about it?