shewhomust (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shewhomust) wrote2009-10-21 09:24 pm
shewhomust) wrote2009-10-21 09:24 pm
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In Quimper, with a camera
It was ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler's idea that we should spend a night in Quimper; if there was any particular reason he didn't mention it, but he was keen, and the Brittany Ferries package we were booking offered a hotel there - not the most exciting looking of their hotels, but in the right place and at the right price, so we went for it.
I thought we'd been to Quimper before - I thought we'd explored Brittany pretty thoroughly, and I vaguely remembered a Tourist Office with a display of the faïence for which the place is known... Unless I'm thinking of Nevers? Because I also have vague memories of walking round ramparts washed by the sea, and I'm pretty sure now that was Concarneau - not Quimper, at any rate, which is not on the coast...
Which is how we came to be strolling, in the low light of an autumn evening, around a town that was completely new to us, crossing the Odet, the river which runs down the centre of the main street and whose many footbridges are weighed down by baskets of flowers, and making our way into the old town in search of dinner. And when I say old, I mean it: Brittany is full of towns that look old to someone who lives in Durham, towns like Josselin, where half-timbered houses lean to meet each other across narrow streets.
Quimper has its share of old houses, and a taste for painting them in bright shades - or filling their windows top-to-bottom with primary colours. I wanted to photograph everything, and though I did take a fair number of photos of Quimper, both that evening and the morning after, they aren't all fit to be shown to the world. I'm nowhere near mastery of my new camera - only gradually learning what it can do, and what foibles it displays in doing it. I need to learn how much more I am photographing than the viewfinder shows me, and how it is distributed; I need to makes sure I am holding the camera level (this has always been the case, but more so, now). It's wonderful, taking pictures in narrow streets, to have some extra wide-angle capacity - but the resultant fisheye distortion can be spectacular.
And I need to read the manual. There's a lot of it to read, and it's perfectly possible to set the dial to auto and just point and shoot. But what a waste. I'm absurdly pleased with this picture: walking back to the hotel after dinner, following the little river Steir down to its meeting with the Odet (I was amazed, the next morning, to read that this picturesque waterway had actually been built over in the mid-twentieth century, and only opened again in 2003: even if we had been in Quimper before, we could not have seen it... But I digress) we came across a tiny garden arranged around this bust of resistance leader Jean Moulin, the dramatic lighting throwing shadows from the trees (which were waving wildly in the wind) onto the white facade of the Monoprix shop. I set the 'film speed' to as fast as it would go, braced myself against a handy lamp post and went for it - and the result does catch something of what I saw. But reading the manual later, I discovered descriptions of all the 'scene' settings, including a night-time one which I think would have given me a gentle flash and removed the shadow on the face. I don't know if it would have been better, but I'd like to have tried it.
It's a learning curve.
durham_rambler's idea that we should spend a night in Quimper; if there was any particular reason he didn't mention it, but he was keen, and the Brittany Ferries package we were booking offered a hotel there - not the most exciting looking of their hotels, but in the right place and at the right price, so we went for it.I thought we'd been to Quimper before - I thought we'd explored Brittany pretty thoroughly, and I vaguely remembered a Tourist Office with a display of the faïence for which the place is known... Unless I'm thinking of Nevers? Because I also have vague memories of walking round ramparts washed by the sea, and I'm pretty sure now that was Concarneau - not Quimper, at any rate, which is not on the coast...
Which is how we came to be strolling, in the low light of an autumn evening, around a town that was completely new to us, crossing the Odet, the river which runs down the centre of the main street and whose many footbridges are weighed down by baskets of flowers, and making our way into the old town in search of dinner. And when I say old, I mean it: Brittany is full of towns that look old to someone who lives in Durham, towns like Josselin, where half-timbered houses lean to meet each other across narrow streets.
Quimper has its share of old houses, and a taste for painting them in bright shades - or filling their windows top-to-bottom with primary colours. I wanted to photograph everything, and though I did take a fair number of photos of Quimper, both that evening and the morning after, they aren't all fit to be shown to the world. I'm nowhere near mastery of my new camera - only gradually learning what it can do, and what foibles it displays in doing it. I need to learn how much more I am photographing than the viewfinder shows me, and how it is distributed; I need to makes sure I am holding the camera level (this has always been the case, but more so, now). It's wonderful, taking pictures in narrow streets, to have some extra wide-angle capacity - but the resultant fisheye distortion can be spectacular.
And I need to read the manual. There's a lot of it to read, and it's perfectly possible to set the dial to auto and just point and shoot. But what a waste. I'm absurdly pleased with this picture: walking back to the hotel after dinner, following the little river Steir down to its meeting with the Odet (I was amazed, the next morning, to read that this picturesque waterway had actually been built over in the mid-twentieth century, and only opened again in 2003: even if we had been in Quimper before, we could not have seen it... But I digress) we came across a tiny garden arranged around this bust of resistance leader Jean Moulin, the dramatic lighting throwing shadows from the trees (which were waving wildly in the wind) onto the white facade of the Monoprix shop. I set the 'film speed' to as fast as it would go, braced myself against a handy lamp post and went for it - and the result does catch something of what I saw. But reading the manual later, I discovered descriptions of all the 'scene' settings, including a night-time one which I think would have given me a gentle flash and removed the shadow on the face. I don't know if it would have been better, but I'd like to have tried it.
It's a learning curve.
learning curve
(Anonymous) 2009-10-22 10:46 am (UTC)(link)The Powershot G10 manual is a huge .pdf file, too big to print, horrible on screen.
May I offer a short cut to explore? - namely, the nice bright screen.
As an old-fashioned snapper I too was an optical-viewfinder person till I got a G10.
But I found that some of the cool features (face detection ...) only operate if you use the screen instead.
Then if you do, what you see is what you get!!
Obviously in terms of composition - i.e., field of view - first of all.
But in addition, to get things vertical/horizontal, you can switch on the rule-of-thirds grid as a reference (press display twice).
And if you turn the convenient dial at top-left to under- or over-expose as needed, you see the result live on the screen. (In grid mode, on an inset exposure histogram too.) This is very useful!
All together, I'm totally converted and use the screen now far more than the optical v-f!
- best wishes, Bob the bolder
PS - in low light, you can simply turn the ISO dial one notch from 'auto' to 'high' and let the camera do the work.
Re: learning curve
Yes, clearly I'm going to have to bite the bullet and use the screen more!