To my amazement my new computer arrived yesterday afternoon, a mere 24 hours after I ordered it. Much as I was looking forward to the increased performance of a new machine I wasn’t looking forward to moving all my documents across to it. The main documents was the easy part but when I came to shift all my photos over in Lightroom I ran into major headaches, despite following all the right procedures. I spent a couple of hours trying to live chat with the tech folks at Adobe, only to find that they don’t work on a Saturday. Ultimately I managed to get everything where it should be and I was finally able to import the few photos I’ve taken today and edit one to post here. It’s certainly taken patience and perseverance in spades but, from what I’ve seen so far, my new computer has all the speed of a thoroughbred race horse and that should be a joy once I’m over the frustrations of today!
26 January 2018 - Rummaging around
The local birdlife seemed on particularly good form at Hatfield Forest this morning, with several robins filling the air with song. Opposite my 'office' the jackdaws were having a good old rummage around in the grass for tasty goodies, oblivious to my presence. I hoped to get more photos of them but this plan was scuppered by two rather overenthusiastic spaniels who came bursting through the gate and scared them off!
25 January 2018 - Cosy
Being stuck at home this week has been very frustrating, especially when the sun is shining and I'd prefer to be outdoors taking photos. However, I wasn't going to be defeated, so I sought inspiration from the Photoblog 365 Photo Ideas calendar, where today's theme is cosy. You may remember my little pocket bear, Cuthbert, who starred on my blog back in December. My Mum thought he looked a little chilly with no clothes so she's been busy knitting him an outfit. He's now a very well dressed bear about town, with trousers, a scarf (not pictured here - it wasn't that cold indoors!), hat and a cape! He looks decidedly cosy so he was a natural choice for the theme.
For my close up picture I had another try with the Panasonic G9's high resolution mode and, boy, does it make a difference having more light to play with! The high res RAW files come in at a whopping 80 megapixels and some 10,368 pixels long on their longest edge. The level of detail when you zoom in is astonishing and Cuthbert, with his fuzzy texture, was the perfect subject to see this. Of course, the files are enormous (a 461MB TIFF file once I'd tweaked him in Color Efex Pro!) so my aging computer complained a lot! However, that should soon be a thing of the past as my other activity for today was ordering a new computer. The new laptop will have an i7 processor, 32MB of RAM, a 1TB solid state hard drive and a 4K screen so Lightroom should absolutely whizz along once I've got it up and running! My current computer is almost five years old so I'm hoping the spec of the new one should keep me going for at least another five....
24 January 2018 - The holy grail of gloves?
As a photographer who suffers from Raynauds Syndrome, keeping my hands warm and functional while shooting in the winter is a perpetual challenge. The combination of winter weather and a cold camera are often enough to drain the blood from my fingertips, making it incredibly hard to feel the buttons and dials. When I used a DSLR I found silk lined leather gloves gave me enough dexterity, while being windproof. Of course, once I went mirrorless and introduced a touchscreen into the mix they didn't work.
I've tried various touchscreen gloves and found them all too bulky for precise control but last winter I discovered some cosy cashmere fingerless gloves which convert into mittens for warmth when it's needed. Although they have covered thumbs I found I could still the operate the touchscreen on my Panasonic GX8. Imagine my frustration when I bought my new G9 and discovered they've changed the touchscreen and my wonderful gloves no longer work!
A chance conversation with another photographer at Snetterton last week made me look up arthritis gloves online and found these beauties. They're thin, knitted gloves but with silver thread running through them. The silver reflects the heat back inside and has the added bonus that it is conductive enough to work with a touchscreen - result! Time will tell if they're really the perfect photography gloves but at least I can spend the rest of this winter shooting with warm hands and have complete control of my camera - fingers crossed!
23 January 2018 - Nature’s design
I’m delighted to say the glitch which prevented iOS device and Mac users seeing my pictures over on Photoblog seems to have been eradicated at last. That should make this duplicate blog redundant. Of course, I’m not going to tempt fate just now but abandoning this but, assuming it continues to work, I may well repurpose this part of my website in a week or two. Watch this space for further info!
In the meantime, here’s today’s post.....
My plan this afternoon was to have another go with the high resolution mode on my camera. However, I stupidly left it too late in the day and by the time I made a start the light levels had dropped too much for me to be able to use a low enough ISO setting for ultimate quality. This picture was shot in high res mode but at ISO 1600 its detail isn’t as clean as I’d have liked. It was as useful lesson learnt though and it made a pretty monochrome picture of nature’s use of the Fibonacci series in any case!
22 January 2018 - Curling up with a good book
Once again I've tried to stay indoors as much as possible today while my cold improves. Changes of temperature send me into paroxysms of violent coughs which, as well as being painful thanks to pulled stomach muscles, are liable to send any passersby running for the hills in fear of Aussie Flu! I've caught up on a few admin jobs around the house but also took the opportunity to do a spot of reading. My current book, The Ashes of London by Andrew Taylor, is a murder mystery set in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London in 1666 and a bit of a page turner. Settling down this afternoon I grabbed a coffee and couple of welshcakes to go with it and was inspired to shoot the scene as my offering for this week's 'words' theme over on the Photoblog forum. If you fancy participating in the theme do pop over to the weekly theme thread and see what it's all about.
21 January 2018 - Waiting patiently
We were supposed to have lots of rain today but apparently no one told the weather that, so we had snow instead! I've been keeping indoors as I've got a hacking cough and cold so I spent some time watching the birds at our feeding station. The blackbirds have well and truly got the knack of feeding from the fat balls now but they do have to queue up as there's only one perch from which they can reach them. This young female blackbird was looking particular puffed up as she waited patiently and the falling snow just adds that winter wonderland finishing touch!
20 January 2018 - Me and my hamster
Much of the time Lucy ignores the many toys we've bought for her over the years but from time to time she suddenly finds the impulse to hunt. Today's favourite was this hamster and I found her sitting on the living room floor this afternoon contemplating it!
19 January 2018 - In search of speed
Since I took delivery of my new camera a couple of weeks ago I've been looking an opportunity to properly test its ability to track moving subjects accurately. What I needed was a ready supply of subjects who would obligingly keep speeding past my camera. The local birdlife hasn't been cooperative enough so I decided to seek out speed of a mechanical variety instead. Snetterton race circuit provided the source I needed, with a track day taking place today, so I drove up to Norfolk this morning. An eclectic mix of cars continuously sped around the track all day so I was able to try out lots of different settings. As I suspected the camera's bespoke tracking mode isn't very good, although I had the odd success.
I had much more success using a single focus point but with the camera set to continuous focus and I moved that focus point to where I wanted it with my thumb on the touchscreen. The other useful option was to activate all 225 focus points and tell the camera which group of points I wanted it to start with. Having locked onto the lead car the camera then tracked it across the viewfinder pretty well, although I suspect this would work less well with a large field of cars in a race.
Someone's facing the wrong way here! I caught a long chain of 28 shots of this incident and the camera focused precisely for the vast majority of them.
Normally I would spend some time doing some slow speed panning work to create a sense of speed in my pictures. I did a little of that today, but most of the time I stuck to a shutter speed of around a thousandth of a second. That meant I was unlikely to have any problems with camera shake and any failures were going to largely down to the camera rather than me!
One of my successful slow shutter panning shots from today. This gives a much greater sense of speed but results in a much lower success rate on any camera, mirrorless or otherwise.
Some seven hundred frames later I headed home, happy that I'd give my camera a really good test. It achieved a much better success rate than my little GX8 and I think the G9 now matches the abilities of the Canon DSLR I've just sold so I'm happy with my choice. All I need now is for the weather to warm up so I can get out to photograph more motorsport and aviation events and hone my skills!
18 January 2018 - Aviators and acrobats
The birds who visit our garden are an endless source of entertainment and I keep some binoculars beside the kitchen window at all times to aid identification. Today we had the usual range of aviators in the garden - lots of goldfinches plus the odd greenfinch, half a dozen blackbirds and a solitary robin. Shooting through the kitchen window I was able to catch them all on camera, although it was a bit of a challenge as yesterday's bright sunshine had long since gone.
This afternoon, staring aimlessly out of the window, I noticed we had an additional visitor - more of an acrobat than an aviator. Most days this squirrel scoots along the back fence (the theme from Mission Impossible always passes through my mind when I see this!) but it rarely ventures further than that. Today though he or she whizzed up the bird feeder tree to nab some tasty morsels from the fatballs. I know technically grey squirrels are vermin but I couldn't help admire this one's grace as it scaled the tree and I don't mind too much, as long as it only makes the occasional raid on the bird food!