Waiting

I was at North Mole yesterday evening, along with half the city, waiting to farewell the Queen Mary 2. This was actually taken after she had left, but a lot of people waited for ages... to get out of the gridlock that was North Mole.

The Commute

I spend a lot of my life on buses. Waiting for them. Wondering if I'm going to make a certain bus at a certain time. Pacing around a stop bench willing one to arrive earlier, because I've just missed the last one and it's a 45 minute wait for the next.

(The last of that happens more often than it should.)

The commute is an ongoing module in my qualification from the University of Life. It's an exercise of being removed from any controllable context, which is kind of freeing; my daily lesson in How To Let Go Because There Isn't A Damned Thing You Can Do About It.

One day I remembered again that my stupid telephone which hangs and reboots itself all the time had a camera, that I could be doing something educational instead of twiddling my thumbs without anything to read. So I did.

These are mostly taken with the E71, with a few from the recently acquired G11, which is proving to be a great little camera for this kind of shooting.

My daily meditation.

I have a new toy...

... and it's a Canon, much to the amusement of everyone aware of my Nikon loyalties.

A couple of weeks back I won a Canon G11 from Digital Rev's Facebook Fan giveaway. I had no idea they were even running a comp, so was rather happy with the result. Especially since I've been wanting a good pocket camera for the longest time, but couldn't bring myself to spend the dough on one of these when it could go towards, say, my 24mm f1.4 fund.

Thank you Digital Rev!

Doesn't my new toy look good when the JPEG's straight out of a Nikon:


I'm still learning how to get what I want out of it, and having all manner of stupid fun in the process.

Friday evening I joined a couple of regular photowalkers down at Cottesloe to have a look at Sculpture by The Sea. The following photos were taken by the G11, set to Black and White, JPEG, ISO 800 - 1600. Most of these are heavily cropped to remove the date stamp at the bottom of the image, that I had apparently set the camera to insert.

I'm finding it fairly disconcerting to use something:

• So small
• So silent - where's the obnoxious mirror slap?
• So differently laid out
• That weighs nothing

All of that effectively means I:

• Keep hitting random additional buttons when taking a photo
• Am never quite sure if I've actually taken the photo
• Take forever to find the right menu setting if I want to change anything
• Move it a lot more than intended

Which means I haven't been able to get anything decent on it so far, but operator error should cease once I get used to it.

I'm pretty impressed with my little camera so far. Great image quality and lowlight handling ability for something so small, and what grain I got out of my JPEGs has a pleasing pattern to it. Now to eliminate the dumb human aspect...