Gang Aft Agley

Yesterday afternoon I was able to pick up my new camera, though I had to run to a second store to pick up the 55-200VR lens as they were out of stock at the branch I chose to go to. It is such a pleasant experience to be able to store more than a handful of pictures on the camera at a time, no more lugging the laptop out for something as simple as a soccer game. Our previous camera had a limit of 64mb of memory, though we had never purchased such a large card, 32mb was big enough at the time. To make matters worse we had lost the 32mb card several years ago, and were stuck with just the 8mb card that initially shipped with the camera. Off the top of my head thats 43 jpeg images at a time or 7 tiffs.

With nothing more than a glance at the quickstart manual I headed off to Caden’s game. An hour later I had a collection of blurred and out of focus images, with a few that might be kept. Not necessarily a reflection of the camera or the operator. I knew going in that the lighting was horrible, yet I was mainly interested in using it as a learning experience, and I quickly learned not to shoot handheld telephoto shots in low lighting. What I was interested in was the area of the pitch that I could cover, as with my previous camera I was limited to plays happening directly in front of me if any detail was to be included, otherwise it showed up as a group of players too small to see who had the ball.

After I got home and read the manual a little more in depth, I found that I wasn’t using the focus correctly (duh), in sports mode it will continually update the focus on the center sensor, only using the other sensors when nothing is in the center. I was treating the focus more like my old 35mm nikon autofocus where I would continually have to lift my finger off the button and then press it halfway down again to tell it to start to focus again.

I managed to regain a whole bunch of photos that I had thought were lost. I had given my Mother in Law copies of them when she got her laptop, almost 2 years ago now. Plus I had given her photos of last summers trip east to Tim's wedding.

Not quite the true panoramic photo, but I didnt have a tripod.