The winner of my camera run-off, after much reading, playing with cameras, and pondering, was the Olympus C-7000. What with the craziness of work, I haven't had too much time to play with it, but this morning a leaf on our patio/deck/porch caught my eye. All but one other leaf I could see were wet in a vague, glossy-sheen sort of way, but this one leaf was instead studded with individial water drops. Since one of the things that swayed me toward the Olympus was the 5x optical zoom and super-macro shooting mode (as close as 2cm), this leaf called out to me as a perfect zoom test subject.
And so, in celebration of my camera, I am opening a new “Photos” section with a few leaf pictures. The large versions have been scaled down significantly; the original files are over three times the size (in each direction). 7 mega-pixels is a lot of pixels!
First, the secondary droplet-covered leaf. Not so interesting as a picture as the one that caught my attention, but it gives the context for the detail veiw (which shows the full resolution of the camera).
I love the full view of the sky and trees overhead in the drop. The hardest part of taking this picture was making sure I didn't actually hit the leaf with my lens, I was so close.
Then a shot I like since it captures a bit of the feeling I got when I first glanced outside and the leaf jumped out at me. It's great fun to play with the photos afterwards, which is what I love most about digital photography. One press of a button gives me a sepia view, which I really like for the way it brings out the brightness of the water drops. Then I just had fun with the image for a few minutes, and created a version which is completely different from what was actually there, but says a lot about the way I saw the leaf.
The hardest part here was the angle; the LCD screen came in extremely handy as I don't think I could have gotten my head low enough to frame the shot the way I wanted if I'd needed to use the viewfinder, and as it was I still needed to crop slightly to get the frame right (another reason to love digital!).
Hopefully this section will grow as I have time to take my camera exploring.
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