New camera

Inspired by Wendy at Blue Borage, I recently bought a new camera.  If you could see my stock of cameras, you might think this unjustified.  I go back to 35mm and APS film systems, have a movement-triggered wildlife camera and a motorbike/windscreen cam, as well as a nice compact digital.  My Canon SLR 35mm film body went a while ago, but its lenses live on with a digital body picked up on Ebay. But the point is, even with an SLR reasonably long zoom lens, I have been missing out on distant telephoto targets.  So enter a superzoom bridge camera, a little smaller than an SLR with a standard lens, capable of bringer those distant objects really close.

Our long-planned week-long trip to the Outer Hebrides offered an opportunity to try it out.  I was interested to test some of its overall capability, but also interested to see what I could gather in the way of wildlife shots.  That last category I will leave for another blog.  Here's a short account of the trip in some other images.

I first crossed to Skye on the ferry from Kyle of Lochalsh about 50 years ago.  The 'new' bridge does seem a bit of a cheat, but it is very convenient, and photogenic with the Skye peaks in the background.

We drove across Skye, stopping off briefly at a couple of favourite places in Portree, and caught the afternoon ferry to Lochmaddy on North Uist from Uig on Skye's north-west coast.  This is the ferry coming in (I'm getting used to the telephoto capacity here.)

 While we were waiting to board, Liz asked me take a photograph of a church on a distant hillside.  With a small amount of telephoto, this is how it looked:

To show off the camera's capability, this is maximum telephoto:

From the deck of the ferry (with hardly any roll, it was very calm) here is a view back to the Cuillins:

The rest of the images show the camera's ability to reproduce colours faithfully.  I am being lazy and using the straightforward, built-in formatting.  It is possible to extract RAW data and do more editing - something for another day.

Here is a North Uist sunset at about 11pm (15 June, a week to go to the longest day):

Here is Trinity Temple on South Uist, where Duns Scotus studied:

Here are hand-dyed, hand-knitted and crocheted works of art at the Hebridean Woolshed:

And to end with, a couple of landscape shots.  The first a standard shot of an-anything-but-standard beach (3 miles of deserted heaven - just the two of us all afternoon):

The second, an appreciation of the islanders' sense of colour fun - a crofter's shed picked out from a distant road in the late afternoon:

This camera is, in my humble opinion, a great bit of kit.