tea – Page 30 – Clive's Blog

Something to Read on Holiday

15 August 2008 / General / iPhone camera apps, photography, River Witham, tea

Bought an excellent book to read whilst on holiday – The Digital SLR Handbook by Michael Freeman.

I have a number of photo books by Michael Freeman that I used extensively when I was working in, and teaching photography. He writes really informative books on photography so when I decided I wanted something about digital photography he was the only choice for me.

Now for lots of good reasons I do not have a digital SLR but use a Canon Powershot S2 IS – an excellent bridge camera, quick to use, flexible, creative and light to carry when walking. Many things in the book were not applicable but it covered the things I want to get to grips with really well. Top of the list was histograms and exposure – and I have been working on that and have seen an improvement in the exposures. I also want to start to use Photoshop on my images and he has some good things to say about that.

The final thing I got from the book (so far as I have not read it all yet) is that my next camera is likely to be a Canon G9 so I can shoot in RAW. So out goes the idea of a Nikon P60 as a lightweight walking camera (lost interest in that when I found out it does not have live view of the exposure) and in comes the G3 – the only thing holding me back on that is that it uses battery packs not AA cells. Well I am not going to buy it tomorrow so by Christmas there may be something else on the market that does what I want in a compact digital format,

Compact size
Viewfinder (absolutely essential)
SD cards
AA cell power
Short zoom 5x optical at least
RAW and jpeg (now)
Image stabilisation
Live view
Manual exposure
Some useful modes – snow and foliage are two I use on my S2 all the time
Hot shoe (well it is a low priority)

Well it is “my” wish list.

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Elgin Cathedral

We went to Elgin today – to see Elgin Cathedral. Diana had been there when she was six or seven and had been very impressed by it, so we were going back to have a look.

As we entered the town there was a sign saying it was an “Historic Cathedral Town” – and that was the the only sign we could see for the Cathedral. We parked and tried to find the Tourist Information – there was a sign for that and we followed it, but we could not find the Tourist Information. There were a number of information sign posts – showing where the post office, town centre and other things were but no Cathedral sign.

So out with the PDA, Memory-Map and the GPS unit – the cathedral was marked on the OS map and the GPS took us there. (See here for my mobile tech kit.)

There was sign for the cathedral which we found eventually, and if we had been coming in from the other side of the town we would have seen it – of course we would have seen it if we had given up, got the car and left Elgin to go to Aberdeen instead – as we were leaving the town!

Come Elgin council get your act together – it cannot be hard to put a few signs up – where the tourists can see them.

The Cathedral was impressive – we shall go back next year and have a good look round. The Biblical Gardens next door to the cathedral were excellent and well worth visiting Elgin for on there own.