A walk with a new camera
Apr. 9th, 2022 10:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyofastolatSo I REALLY didn't do well, when, inspired by reading my ancient diaries, I said I'd try to post a lot more often. Then, of course, the longer I left it, the more daunting a prospect it seemed to resume things. (Not that I've really done anything noteworthy for ages, except for slaying multifarious nefarious monsters at the command of Odin himself, and building a Viking metropolis. Which, granted, would be pretty impressive, had it been remotely real. ("You have played Valheim for 393 hours. Would you recommend it?" Steam rather amusingly asked me the other day.)
So, anyway (and, as I've said before, I should really stop starting sentence with "so," but today is not that day), rather than bother trying to catch up (and, really, the last three months can basically be summed up by "Valheim") I'll just launch straight in.
I got a new camera for my birthday. This has actually added rather to the daunt of posting, because the camera has been sitting there staring at me, saying, "hello! I'm new and complicated! You can do such things with me, what they are you know not, but before that you have to learn how to use me and I am HARD!" Then there was that knowledge that even if I DID work out how to take a picture with it, I wanted to find a non-LJ alternative for photo posting, and that, too, was full of daunt.
But last weekend ("But." Probably not much better than "so." Oh well.) Pellinor went off to the mainland to hit people over the head with swords, so I girded up my lions (comical ones, naturally), grabbed the camera, and went up a Down.
The car park was full of milling boy scouts, with a few weary adults in attendance. I met more clumps of scouts coming down the golf course as I headed up, then a lost-looking trudging scout leader, sans scouts. "How far is it to the road?" she asked with an air of resigned desperation. "Um, I don't know... nearly a mile?" I said. "Five minutes?" she asked hopefully. "Um... I think I've done it in, oooh, 15 minutes? A bit longer? but I've been walking briskly, so..." "Ten minutes?" she asked. I tried to explain that it did actually depend on how fast she was walking, so I couldn't give an unambiguous answer, but I'm not sure she really understood. I told her that a lot of her group had been in the car park when I left, and I'd met several other clumps on the way down. "They've finished!" she cried, with the air of one who'd been told that the Holy Grail had been found, and off she trudged.
Then it was time to contend with the Daunting Camera of Newness, when I saw a scenic paraglider. To be honest, I'm not sure that his main motivation was to provide scenicness. I think he was beached on a little lower on the slope, since his... sail? lurked there for a good long while. I don't think he was dead, because I later saw him back up in the sky. Or saw his sail(?) anyway; I have no actual data on whether he was attached, or, if he was, if he was alive (or indeed if he was a he) but I expect I'd have seen something in the local press had disaster befallen him.
But what about the camera, I hear you ask? Well, I managed to switch it on, and I managed to take a picture. Unfortunately, the screen was so reflective that I wasn't entirely sure what I was taking a picture OF, but you can't have everything. (My old camera's screen was matte. Why have screens all gone reflective? It's why I cling to my old-fashioned Kindle.)
(Photographic aside. I had a Photobucket account from years ago, and used to use it for all my LJ posts, before I realised that I could host pictures directly on LJ. When they shouted at me a year or two ago to pay up or lose things, I decided to pay, in the short term at least, since it was easier than trying to find an alternative. A lot of old posts and old illustrated fanfics still had Photobucket links, and I didn't think I wanted to lose them. "I'll look into it in the next few months and see if I can find an alternative," I thought. Needless to say, I never did, so there pics are on Photobucket.)
The beached paraglider's friend (or rival? Gloating enemy?) was having a much nicer time of it, circling above in his comfy bed like a lazy vulture.
I couldn't immediately work out how to view the pictures I'd taken, so I adopted a proper scientific approach: press random buttons until something happens. What DID happen was that I somehow managed to activate an on-screen indication of what horizontal was. This was quite useful, since I have dreadful trouble getting my photos straight and nearly always have wonky horizons. I've no idea how I did it, though, or how, some while later, I accidentally switched it off again.
Even with this artificial aid, I'm still not entirely sure that the horizon is straight. Oh well.
Here is some Down, trying to camouflage itself as a giraffe. I was not fooled.
(An aside: inserting links from Photobucket is so easy! I'm sure it was a lot more fiddly when I used to do it ten years ago.)
Then down through Trudge Lane (not its real name) to the coast, for a few miles of coastal path. Here is a stile whose prettiness significantly exceeds its usefulness, since the path's been moved inland a little in anticipation of future coastal erosion. At this point, my camera started shouting at me to use the flash, so I'm not sure what random buttom I accidentally pressed at this point. It got quite sulky when I refused.
My old camera had a fold-out screen, which meant that when I wasn't using it, the screen was safely folded away and protected. Pellinor says he tried very hard to find a similar set-up when buying my new camera, but failed. At this point in the walk, I noticed that the inevitable had already happened: fine, almost-but-not-quite invisible scratches on the screen, presumably from my zip. Since this coincided with the sun going in, I put the camera away in my rucksack at this point.
(The whole thing with the unprotected screen seems SO SILLY! I've now ordered some screen protectors, but the mere fact that you can buy such things shows that there's a need. Grr! Another annoying and silly thing: the lens cap on my old camera was tethered to the camera so was impossible to lose. The new one isn't, and it's fiddly to remove and replace, too - easy to replace it not quite right, and therefore at risk of falling off. When taking a picture, I either have to hold the lens cap or put it in a pocket. I'm going to have to try and contrive something with superglue and sewing thread.)
Anyway... near the end of my walk, I discovered that the National Trust had done a Saruman and turned the landward slopes of Tennyson Down into a still-smoking wasteland, littered with the corpses of ents. I couldn't be bothered to get my camera out of my rucksack, and didn't want to take the time, either. I'd done a complicated overtaking of a large and dispersed group of meandering strollers, charging dogs and unpredicatable children, and didn't want them to overtake me and cause me to negotiate getting past them again. Approaching me was another complicated group with dogs, and a full-on Dog Drama was clearly in the offing. So I grabbed my phone and hastily snapped, both the smoking wasteland and the piled up corpses that was all that remained of the massed armies of Fangorn.
Gosh. What a long post, for an unremarkable walk.
So, anyway (and, as I've said before, I should really stop starting sentence with "so," but today is not that day), rather than bother trying to catch up (and, really, the last three months can basically be summed up by "Valheim") I'll just launch straight in.
I got a new camera for my birthday. This has actually added rather to the daunt of posting, because the camera has been sitting there staring at me, saying, "hello! I'm new and complicated! You can do such things with me, what they are you know not, but before that you have to learn how to use me and I am HARD!" Then there was that knowledge that even if I DID work out how to take a picture with it, I wanted to find a non-LJ alternative for photo posting, and that, too, was full of daunt.
But last weekend ("But." Probably not much better than "so." Oh well.) Pellinor went off to the mainland to hit people over the head with swords, so I girded up my lions (comical ones, naturally), grabbed the camera, and went up a Down.
The car park was full of milling boy scouts, with a few weary adults in attendance. I met more clumps of scouts coming down the golf course as I headed up, then a lost-looking trudging scout leader, sans scouts. "How far is it to the road?" she asked with an air of resigned desperation. "Um, I don't know... nearly a mile?" I said. "Five minutes?" she asked hopefully. "Um... I think I've done it in, oooh, 15 minutes? A bit longer? but I've been walking briskly, so..." "Ten minutes?" she asked. I tried to explain that it did actually depend on how fast she was walking, so I couldn't give an unambiguous answer, but I'm not sure she really understood. I told her that a lot of her group had been in the car park when I left, and I'd met several other clumps on the way down. "They've finished!" she cried, with the air of one who'd been told that the Holy Grail had been found, and off she trudged.
Then it was time to contend with the Daunting Camera of Newness, when I saw a scenic paraglider. To be honest, I'm not sure that his main motivation was to provide scenicness. I think he was beached on a little lower on the slope, since his... sail? lurked there for a good long while. I don't think he was dead, because I later saw him back up in the sky. Or saw his sail(?) anyway; I have no actual data on whether he was attached, or, if he was, if he was alive (or indeed if he was a he) but I expect I'd have seen something in the local press had disaster befallen him.
But what about the camera, I hear you ask? Well, I managed to switch it on, and I managed to take a picture. Unfortunately, the screen was so reflective that I wasn't entirely sure what I was taking a picture OF, but you can't have everything. (My old camera's screen was matte. Why have screens all gone reflective? It's why I cling to my old-fashioned Kindle.)
(Photographic aside. I had a Photobucket account from years ago, and used to use it for all my LJ posts, before I realised that I could host pictures directly on LJ. When they shouted at me a year or two ago to pay up or lose things, I decided to pay, in the short term at least, since it was easier than trying to find an alternative. A lot of old posts and old illustrated fanfics still had Photobucket links, and I didn't think I wanted to lose them. "I'll look into it in the next few months and see if I can find an alternative," I thought. Needless to say, I never did, so there pics are on Photobucket.)
The beached paraglider's friend (or rival? Gloating enemy?) was having a much nicer time of it, circling above in his comfy bed like a lazy vulture.
I couldn't immediately work out how to view the pictures I'd taken, so I adopted a proper scientific approach: press random buttons until something happens. What DID happen was that I somehow managed to activate an on-screen indication of what horizontal was. This was quite useful, since I have dreadful trouble getting my photos straight and nearly always have wonky horizons. I've no idea how I did it, though, or how, some while later, I accidentally switched it off again.
Even with this artificial aid, I'm still not entirely sure that the horizon is straight. Oh well.
Here is some Down, trying to camouflage itself as a giraffe. I was not fooled.
(An aside: inserting links from Photobucket is so easy! I'm sure it was a lot more fiddly when I used to do it ten years ago.)
Then down through Trudge Lane (not its real name) to the coast, for a few miles of coastal path. Here is a stile whose prettiness significantly exceeds its usefulness, since the path's been moved inland a little in anticipation of future coastal erosion. At this point, my camera started shouting at me to use the flash, so I'm not sure what random buttom I accidentally pressed at this point. It got quite sulky when I refused.
My old camera had a fold-out screen, which meant that when I wasn't using it, the screen was safely folded away and protected. Pellinor says he tried very hard to find a similar set-up when buying my new camera, but failed. At this point in the walk, I noticed that the inevitable had already happened: fine, almost-but-not-quite invisible scratches on the screen, presumably from my zip. Since this coincided with the sun going in, I put the camera away in my rucksack at this point.
(The whole thing with the unprotected screen seems SO SILLY! I've now ordered some screen protectors, but the mere fact that you can buy such things shows that there's a need. Grr! Another annoying and silly thing: the lens cap on my old camera was tethered to the camera so was impossible to lose. The new one isn't, and it's fiddly to remove and replace, too - easy to replace it not quite right, and therefore at risk of falling off. When taking a picture, I either have to hold the lens cap or put it in a pocket. I'm going to have to try and contrive something with superglue and sewing thread.)
Anyway... near the end of my walk, I discovered that the National Trust had done a Saruman and turned the landward slopes of Tennyson Down into a still-smoking wasteland, littered with the corpses of ents. I couldn't be bothered to get my camera out of my rucksack, and didn't want to take the time, either. I'd done a complicated overtaking of a large and dispersed group of meandering strollers, charging dogs and unpredicatable children, and didn't want them to overtake me and cause me to negotiate getting past them again. Approaching me was another complicated group with dogs, and a full-on Dog Drama was clearly in the offing. So I grabbed my phone and hastily snapped, both the smoking wasteland and the piled up corpses that was all that remained of the massed armies of Fangorn.
Gosh. What a long post, for an unremarkable walk.
