Fun with a new camera

Wendy and Parker are off at Disney World this week - they are at Epcot today. They are staying off-site at Bonnet Creek Resort (http://www.wyndhambonnetcreek.com/) and it reminds Wendy of Beaches. Wendy already wants to go back for another trip in the near future!

She is taking some photos with her phone, so I'll post some when they return. I have already seen a few using Google Hangouts, and using this on our phones makes it easy (and free!) to communicate during the day to see pictures and keep up on the trip. Disney and the resort are covered by wi-fi, so no need for expensive texting from the US.

I got a new camera last week (a reconditioned Nikon D5200), so Maddy and I went hiking this morning to practice using the camera. It was very cold when we left (+6), but it was much more comfortable once we got going. Maddy was a cooperative subject most of the time. She was intrigued by all of the horses, as there was an Equestrian Triathalon event going on today.

Maddy patiently waiting for me to take pictures.

We went through the Hermitage ruins to see if there were any good shots to be had, and this was my favourite picture. I think I will use it as a Windows wallpaper. I had to drop the resolution of all these images for posting since the jpg images are well over 15 Mb in size! Some of the original RAW files in the camera are closer to 36 Mb!

I learned the controls to set the camera for taking bracketed photos, and took three with different shutter settings to generate a high dynamic range image using Photomatix. I dropped the colour saturation quite a bit to make this image look old. Seemed to work. Maybe I need to wear more saturated colours to make me look less old?

The old train at the Trail Centre in Dundas

All the fall flowers are out in full force, and it seemed almost everything was yellow and green. Here is just one of the images I took. Even caught a couple of insects in the image.

Even weeds are nice when they are brightly coloured.

I'll need to do some more practice to get used to all the settings, so I will post some more pictures if I have time this week.