Photo Time!!!

So, my camera arrived on Wednesday, and it was perhaps the most exciting day of my life.

It's so beautiful.

For the first half hour I walked around with it, cradled in my arms.

It's so beautiful.

Anyway, I eventually stopped stroking it and got round to taking some pictures with it, and needless to say, my first attempts were more than hilarious. It was a bit like learning to drive, or perhaps like a toddler with ten legs learning to walk. I was so excited about what it might MEAN to be able to alter my white balance AT WILL (AT WILL!) that I'd forgotten to read the manual, or rather, I started to read the manual and then my brain was like, "BORING" and I decided just to randomly press buttons to see if I could get it to do what I wanted it to do.

Luckily my beautiful, beautiful baby camera is ergonomic in the extreme, and after the first major errors were over (I didn't figure out how to scroll through options until about twenty minutes in. You don't do it, as you may imagine, by using the arrow keys on the back. They all do completely unexpected things, like set your autofocus. I reset my autofocus 9 times until I realised that approach wasn't going to work (I'm nothing if not persistent)) everything was tickety-boo.

And then I realised I was shit at taking pictures.

Tim, who was impressed by the amount of money I had spent on this camera, wasn't impressed by anything I  produced with it that day (which only increased his impressedness at the amount of money I'd spent), which mostly looked like:

I did not realise this was because I had set my ISO to 100 and my aperture to f22. I was like, "MY SHUTTER SPEED IS THE SLOWEST THERE IS. HOW CAN THIS POSSIBLY BE HAPPENING TO ME."

I quickly learned (again) that theory and practice are quite different things, something I learned (painfully) when learning to drive. No matter how much I knew about what I should be doing, as soon as my foot touched the clutch my brain was like, "STALL. JUST STALL. IT'S SAFER THAT WAY." That's the only explanation I have for the kinds of things I do used to do in the driving seat. 

My brain, constantly undermining me.

So I left it on the sofa** for two days while my brain recovered. And then today, I took it out. And everything was beautiful.

**It was the softest place in the house. So it couldn't injure itself. 

I was initially ambivalent about walking around with a huge camera on my chest like one of those weird people who take huge cameras about and photograph random things, but as soon as I stepped out of the door, I became overwhelmed with the sheer beauty of the world, much akin to Kevin Spacey in American Beauty or whatever. And I took as many pictures as I could until my hands became too numb to hold the camera. Because I forgot to bring gloves.

So let me share my living space with you.

This is our car. Claude.

I took a few pictures of Claude, because I could. And then I discovered the white balance setting. 

This is Claude with the warmth all turned up. Warm Claude!

And this is Claude from a slightly different angle.

You're lucky I'm not showing you all the pictures I took this morning.

Anyway, then I took a stroll around where I live, and I noticed there were plants. And as soon as I saw one plant, I saw more plants! SO MANY PLANTS! In the space of 10 seconds I counted approximately 1 million different ones. All with little leaves and things that were begging to be phorographed. So I went and photographed them all. 

This is with Automatic White balance

This is Plant with tungsten. As you can see, tungsten is yellow, so the camera has made Plant blue. Cold plant!

This is Plant in fluorescent setting. Fluorescent makes things blue, so the camera makes things yellow. Warm plant!

Another Plant! I have approximately 10 photos of this plant on my camera, all apparently the same. Differing only by one f-stop.

I spent most of my morning doing this kind of thing. But isn't it lovely? Lovely Plant.

A house with blue windows! Which blue window would you like?

This is the High Level Bridge, and this is the view I get every morning as I cycle through it to work.

And this.

I came home with bags of shopping from town, because I have friends coming over tonight. But instead of getting down and doing some cooking, what did I do? Yes, that's right. I took photos of my house.

This is Steve:

Isn't he happy? He's happy because he hangs from a handle that I cannot reach in my kitchen. By hanging there, Steve allows me to close that cupboard, protecting all the cups inside. Thanks, Steve!

Here is a photo of all my BMJs, in date order. I am that cool.

This is my flat, for those of you who have not seen it before. Outside the window there are Tibetan prayer flags. Aren't they great?

This is a piece of abstract art that we found with our flat.

 I don't know what it means.

And here are some yellow roses Sophie bought me. Yellow roses are for friendship! And for wide apertures. 

I love my camera. 

But now I should probably go and do something else. Perhaps like preparing for this dinner that I've invited some people to but haven't got round to doing anything for. 

Don't worry. I'll take 1000 photos of it and share them all with you! Aren't you glad you're my friend?