Friday, December 2, 2011

the meaning of life, and whatnot

so what’s it all about, charlie?

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Charlie came to visit me on today’s foray into the woods.

The sky was largely overcast and the lighting conditions were crappy. Or so I thought until I resumed my next lesson in my self-directed Life Curriculum: Learn Your Camera 101. Normally I rely on the Auto-Intelligent settings, even when I’m in Program Mode. (I use Program Mode because it has the macro zoom functionality I use so much for my Flowers’ Naughty Bits Series.) But lately, I’ve been tinkering around more, because Kevin has offered to get me the Next Camera - an SLR of some variety. And I have felt I really should know what capabilities I already have with the Lumix before investing in a new toy. (Don’t worry: I’ll get an SLR. I want the SUPER DOOPER macro lens.)

So anyways. I decided to fiddle with the settings, and here’s the result.

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The camera defaulted to ISO-100 and the flash. This is not at all what my eyeballs were seeing.

Looks what happens when I open that baby up to ISO-1600 and disable the flash.

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Oh yeah, baby. That’s what I’m talking about. A little washed out, a little grainy, but definitely an improvement.

Deep musings occurred.

And I realized, duh: I love this. I.Love.Doing.This. See? How hard was that to say? I – love – just – being – in – nature – and – seeing – what’s – there – to – be – seen. l love being amazed. And I love provoking that in others. Today, I taught a coworker how to use PowerPoint. She was thrilled. Not “holy shit, a bald eagle!” thrilled, but  you know – “oh, cool!” thrilled.  It was a fun moment, but being outside? Waaaaayyyy better.

Playing with the camera is an added bueno. It’s learning another entity’s brain. What will it look like at ISO-800? Or ISO-200? Oh! It’s blurry down there. This explains countless fails, the outtakes of this blog that you seldom see (except for when I do a whole post about them.)

So that was my afternoon. I’ll have lots more tomorrow, I suspect – I haven’t even finished looking at today’s haul.

One more for the road:

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