The good news is a lot of my old photos were recovered from the broken harddrive!

 

 

The good news is a lot of my old photos were recovered! The bad news is I’ve been looking at them and scaring myself. I know I’m my own worst critic but c’mon, what is the focus of this photo? The one egg with no paprika on it? Nothing is really in focus except the bottom of the pan. Today I’d throw this out.

 

This one I dislike for two reasons, 1, the flash was used and didn’t help. I could easily have moved it near the window and it would’ve looked 100thousand times better.

2, the cup cake dead center is in focus and that generally only looks good on portraits. Ah hah! it was a cupcake portrait!

 

 

This one isn’t too terrible or I’m just trying to be nice to my former self and don’t want her to quit.

 

 

Yeah, keep practicing and learning from it. eventually you’ll learn to see the light. Obviously I didn’t have that part down yet.

 

 

High five for these cookies, there’s a nice feel about this photo.

If you have just started do not be afraid to take bad photos the more you shoot the more you learn. Someone said your first 10,000 photos are your worst. For me it may have been my first 40,000.

 

Bridge report. They are getting a little more done each day on this bridge across the Tennessee/Tellico River.

I drove by in the morning when they were working but didn’t have time to stop. At the end of the day I did make time. Well really it was to use the bathroom. There is this bathroom for emergency stopping only. The stalls have no doors but unlike some mechanic shop bathrooms I’ve been in the sink isn’t covered with black grease smudges.

Anyway once I was there I got a good look at the bridge. Those piles they were driving  last spring are now sticking out of the water with concrete looking ready for something.

 

 

I got the opportunity to try out this micro 4/3 mirrorless camera. It’s an older model, so the newer equivalent will have video and other features.

 

 

I went straight to manual to see what it could do.

 

 

It has one dial on the front that is either the shutter or aperture. You just press it once to switch and press it again to switch back. That was pretty easy to pick up.  I didn’t do much manual reading to test this out, I wanted to see what I could quickly figure out.

 

 

There is an AF’AE lock button that I unsuccessfully tried to set to back button focus. I have become totally hooked on BBF and become extremely irritated when I can’t decouple the focus from the shutter.  Just last March I thought I could never learn how to use back button focus and now I’m hooked.

Changing the ISO is easily accessed by clicking the top button on the 4-way buttons on the back of the camera.

It only has one card slot. I prefer two just incase one card corrupts.

 

 

I was not able to figure out how to have one focus point that I could toggle around. Very annoying, the camera was “thinking” and randomly choosing what it “thought “ was the right thing to focus on.

Then Molly said she’d model for me, and the camera thought I’d like some hairs under her chin to be the main focus of this photo. Grrr.

Molly didn’t like the way she looked even though I promised if she’d give me another chance or 20 I might get the camera figured out. She left.

 

 

Then I tried the girls in the pasture.

It seemed soft and mushy. Might be the kit lens, might’ve been me, I’m not sure but I was at f/16 so there’s no reason anything shouldn’t be in focus.

They took one look at me and left.

 

 

So then I decided I’d try out the sunflare. Shooting into the sun, I discovered I had a lot of finger prints on the lens!! Hmm, maybe I should’ve cleaned the lens first.

 

 

This little camera brackets 5 shots! That’s better than a lot of DSLRs, I’m impressed.

 

 

I also like how light it is for a camera with interchangeable lenses.

Would I buy it?

Not unless I could figure out how to select a single focus point. Which might be possible, I’m just not sure. And properly set up back button focus.

The battery life was not impressive, but this is a rather old camera in camera years. I think camera years are like dog years.

The next camera I want to review is the Sony a6000. I think there’s a lot to that little camera. Stay tuned.