Saturday 31 October 2009

Duck race, and how rubbish my camera is in the rain


My last post was pathetic. In order to readdress the balance - in terms of length, anyway - I'll tell you about the walk we went on today. It was a five mile circular walk from Bramerton Woods End by the River Yare near Norwich. In the rain. Well, it didn't rain all the time: a downpour at the beginning and another shower towards the end. About half-way through we came to the Ferry House pub at Surlingham - no, we didn't call in - and the sight of an apparent duck race on the river.


Here they are, approaching the finishing post, and the winner takes it by several lengths.


If you click on the photos you'll see how poor they are. Yes, you can see without clicking, I know.

My photos are rubbish, and I think it's because of the rain. Not getting in the works, but fooling the auto focus. (Oh yes, it must have rained half-way, too!) Most of my photos are out of focus because rain drops in the air near the camera make it think that's where the subject is. I wish I could control the focus myself! Of course, I could on a proper DSLR, as I used to on my SLR, but the compact is just so convenient to have always with me. Can you get compact digital cameras which give you manual focus?

This is from earlier in the walk. It might have been quite nice had it been in focus.


OK, that's enough for this post. I promised my fellow walkers a photo of some of them here, but you'll have to wait until tomorrow!

Just time for a boat shot: this looked a bit like the cratch of a narrowboat as it approached, but it turned out to be an angler speeding along. If it had been a narrowboat I'd have said it was sinking.


By the way, Blogger has been a trial today. On my blog's "home page" there was no "sign in" box at the top. Eventually I tried going to www.blogger.com and found myself able to create a post. Now I'll see if I can publish this.

Not yet, I get this: "Could not contact Blogger.com. Saving and publishing may fail. Retrying..."

3 comments:

Flingel said...

Halfie, Your photos are not rubbish, more likely your other comment that your camera’s rubbish in the rain. Gradually I have persuaded my wife and daughters to change to the Canon Ixus range for a compact – not because I had one but because I was pretty impressed with what others with Canon Ixuses had shown me. Meantime earlier this year when the time came for me to change I stupidly bought a Panasonic DMCLZ10 because it was going cheap. Not that there’s anything wrong with Panasonic cameras per se – and this one got pretty good reviews, but sometimes I get really good photos and sometimes not so good. These not so good are nearly always because of less than satisfactory focussing and initially I thought it was me but I spent quite a while ensuring that I understood how this worked before eventually reckoning that it just might be a problem with the camera rather than me. This suspicion is backed up by the fact that when I sometimes use my wife’s Canon Ixus 65, the focussing always seems to be much better. So I am trying to mentally adjust myself to write off the Panasonic purchase and get a Canon – I keep holding back but every time I end up with another potentially excellent photo where I could I have sworn I’d focussed ok but it isn’t, I kick myself. Anyway that’s just my two penn’orth – now tell me you’ve got a Canon!

Halfie said...

Flingel, no, my camera is a Fujifilm Finepix F50fd. I think I was seduced by the number of megapixels (12)! Until a large speck of crud appeared in the lens system - and the problems I have in rain - I've been pleased with it. (It's my first digital camera). I do get frustrated by the lack of manual focus, though. Are there any digital compacts with manual focus?

Flingel said...

I know the Canon Ixus 980 IS has manual focus as an option - probably not cheap though! If you check it out on Amazon, there are 47 customer reviews with 36 giving it 5/5 and you could probably get quite a lot of info from what they're saying. (Says not in stock presently).