Restarts and camera ramblings

I don't have the hang of this blog thing. I have no desire to log on and express myself at every opportunity. When I post something, I want it to be just right. Well-considered. Appropriately illustrated. Nothing I'm going to squirm over in embarrassment for days after.

And the result is constipation - as you can see looking back here for a few entries. This is my first of the New Year and we're into April already.

So, a new leaf then? Not likely! I think this is just going to stumble on in the same vein. (Can you stumble in a vein? Vision of red blood cells tripping over the uneven cholesterol paving along the vena carva, tumbling over one another.) Stumble along anyway. But at least I'm picking it up again from time to time.

Of course one of the problems has been that during the weeks I'm not in Gothenburg to be an Observer. I have another existence (another life would be putting it too strongly) in a little town called Falköping to the northeast, on the Stokholm train line. Up until March I had no Internet connection from there which meant anything I wanted to do on the net or on Blogger was in competition with all the other things I wanted to do during my 48 hours of real life in Gothenburg. More than that, my pig-headed determination to stay in the 20th century (and a very empty wallet) was keeping me to my old Minolta SLR camera. Great pictures, but getting them developed was so slow or so expensive, and then getting them scanned so I could use them on the net ...

Of course I borrowed my wife's little digital camera and used it for some of the other illos here, but I can't keep doing that.

So now I have a new, digital camera of my very own. (See the thumbnail above!) An Olympus SP-55OUZ. An x18 optical zoom - more than the zoom on my old Minolta even with the zoom lense. A wide angle lense. Image stabilisation. All sorts of interesting settings (P, A, S and M as I'm used to on the manual setting for the Minolta) plus automatic. Plus some sort of light compensation software which allows it to take pics even in low light down to 1600 ASA (they claim - I've yet to test that). Of course, I'm buying it on the never-never, but isn't that what credit's for?

Here is one of my first pics with the camera; taken a month ago on March 4th.

Spring songbird 1, originally uploaded by Gothenburg Observer.

This bird was singing lustily and alone in a bush just down the hill from our flat. I used the zoom to get close and then cropped the picture and adjusted the colour in Photoshop. As you can see on one of the shots (below) the automatic focus decided the branch in front of the bird was more interesting and focused on that.

Spring songbird 2, originally uploaded by Gothenburg Observer.

These pics have been up on my Flickr site for a week now. When I first published them I added a comment that I wasn't sure what the bird was, but that I was sure it wasn't a robin. Well, the more I look at it, the more convinced I am that it is a robin. Rödhaka in Swedish. It's just I'm not used to seeing robins from this angle. (They should be sideways on and portly, preferably perched on the handle of a garden implement, and with snow or frost around. On a Christmas card.)

Well, that's my story anyway. Merry Spring!