mirror, mirror

i managed to take a photo of the newly covered strap and new camera. as i have passed on my old camera, i had to get creative to capture it's photo; thus the old photograph-the-mirror trick. i have a crown sticker on the bathroom mirror, because hey, who doesn't want to feel royal when you first get up in the morning or have had a blah day. i actually like the fuzzy me, and focused sticker; something about not wanting my photo floating around the internet paranoia. eh, you get the idea. the fabric is liberty of london's cotton tana lawn in sydenham palace.

new gadget

since lifting my splendid camera from the box and removing all the new electronic wrappings, i've been trying to learn its "ins and outs" and particulars. indoor lighting at night is never all that spectacular, but i couldn't wait until morning to have a go. here are some of the better efforts:

nala, the pretty putty cat.

my thread wall.

a fun discovery while playing around with the iso.

once morning came around i was able to take better lit photos. there's something so perfect about daylight, it's my first preference for photos.

one of the chawan i use for my morning ocha.

we had spinning today, so i brought it along there as well. i'm the fiber guild of the savannahs'  newsletter creator, so it will be great to be able to take photos of our doing's to flesh it out a bit. i couldn't really do that with the old camera, as i would need to bring along several batteries as well. yay for upgrades!

maybe this time

you know how sometimes you buy something, like a camera, and refuse to see the obvious signs of "somethings not right here", and when the scales fall from your eyes, it's too late to return said electronic? i did something like that when i bought a digital camera several years back. it's a battery eater, and likes to shut down due to a faulty glitch which shows an inaccurate battery charge which was somehow not grounds for a refund. which i dealt with for awhile by using rechargeable batteries. but then three months ago i dropped it and the battery cover doesn't close all the way and so it only stays on long enough to take 5-10 photos before it demands a battery change. which means it's pretty well tied to home photos only, and the nearest outlet.

the camera i had before that was a regular 35mm film roll-type and was always a gamble on getting any good photos. like that trip to the bahamas where 95% of the photos had 2/3rds sky and just the tops of peoples heads. or the trip to europe which looked like it was nighttime 24/7. oops. mostly user error, by the way, but there's a reason the lcd screen on cameras should be listed as one of the major achievements of the last decade. needless to say, a battery draining camera with an lcd screen far outweighs it's faults when compared to it's predecessors.

so, back to the story, i was walking through a department store the other day and came across a cool looking camera, the nikon 1 j1, in white, and thought maybe it's time to get a new camera. and hey, it's tax time right, so i should be getting something back. i have an affinity for white electronics, they're so clean, and non-heavy looking. what i also liked about this particular camera is that it has changeable lenses, and i could wear it around my neck on a cool strap so that i may actually take photos, which would mean i was a serious artist, and who needs a sketchbook when one has a nifty camera? (all this in the same wishful daydreaming voice which stuck me with braces and glasses; i thought the little neon bands were cool, and that frames were cool, and would make me interesting. until i actually had to wear them, at which time my happy thought bubble deflated.)

i like the wider neck strap which comes with the nikon dslr cameras, rather than the narrower streamlined matching strap the j1 has; it looks like it would distribute the weight better, and be more comfy after awhile. downside being the bright yellow "nikon" and black colorway. but hey, i could recover the strap with a pretty liberty fabric, inspired by karyn from the workroom. the strap along with the j1 should be arriving next week at some time, and i do so hope we'll be friends. and if not, i actually read the return policy this time.

phase

i learned something new about my camera; the shutter speed can be really really interesting. i was trying to capture the full moon with my camera and started playing with the settings in order to do it well. of all the ones i took, these three are my favorite: