My new camera
River Lambourn and K&A Canal, Saturday 5th November 2011
I’ve bought a new camera, a Nikon Coolpix P7100. It’s a fixed lens camera with the functionality of a DSLR (apparently) but without the bulk. The purchase came about because my faithful old Ixus 700 decided to stop displaying anything on the display, it would still take pictures but I had no idea what it had taken or what the settings were. Photos became a bit of a lottery.
The new Nikon has more dials, knobs and buttons than I know what to do with but crucially it has an auto button and up until now that’s all I’ve used. Today, however, I ventured into unknown territory…I used the aperture dial. My beginners book (Digital Cameras for Numpties) tells me that the aperture is the size of hole which lets light through the lens to the picture sensor thingy. If it’s a gloomy day increasing the aperture allows more light through so you can take pics without the need for the flash to operate. This seems like a good deal to me, the flash tends to wash out colours so if you can do without it then all the better, I’m sure there’s a trade off somewhere but until I’ve read more of my book I’ll carry on increasing the aperture in blissful ignorance.
Today was very gloomy, great for fishing, crap for photos. I started on a different section of the Lambourn to Steve, I prefer it because it has more variety of swims but today the level was so low any deep glides were at a premium. It was fishable and I did enjoy a brief encounter with a shoal of small but perfectly formed brownies, the grayling, however, eluded me. Steve did much better further upstream, he managed to pick out the holding spots and exploit them very well and his reward was a grayling tally of well into double figures.
So with Steve trouncing me in the grayling competition I thought I’d start a new contest, one for which he was totally ill-equipped. He was at the wrong venue and he didn’t have the right bait, he didn’t even know it was a contest (I didn’t tell him) so the odds were very much in my favour. I haven’t forgotten the bar billiards.
Back to apertures, by the time I arrived at the chosen spot it was well into the afternoon and I only had a couple of hours light left so much camera fiddling was required. It seemed to work, none of these pics needed the flash.
A new PB and my first ever 3lb perch.....3lb 7oz;
The old PB of 2lb 12oz;
The old, old PB of 2lb 8oz;
And a two pounder;
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