A life of pane ? - Sleepypete's Pillow

Hello everyone,

Picture. Meme. A tortoiseshell coloured cat wearing glasses. The cat is in a sitting down pose on a chair, with paws up on a folded newspaper. The captions are "The face is like a work of art." "It deserves a great frame."

I meant to do a post last week but something happened which meant having to ration the rational thought for a while :

Picture. We're looking at a pair of broken glasses and a dwagon. We see one half of the glasses, with the dwagon in the background holding up the disconnected glasses leg in outstretched paws.

Eek. That happened while I was cleaning the reading glasses while at an off site meeting a couple of Thursdays ago. The optician and me didn’t think it was fixable but they were able to pop me in for a rather emergency appointment on the Friday. And the new pairs arrived Friday two days ago. I could have done with an upgrade anyway, that pair were done during covid times and the mask was making the machine fog up … so the prescription was a bit off.

So what happened there ? The learn from experience wise after the event thing points me towards that join there. Most of the frames in the shop look like they’re made with a bend in the metal or plastic to make that 90 degrees between the lenses part and the legs part. A bend means the metal is somewhat gently formed through that 90 degrees and it’ll keep the bonds between the atoms intact. Those frames were made with a fold, which will break the bonds between the atoms and introduce a weakness that’ll lead to cracking and the fairly clean break you see there.

If you see the metal formed into a U shape throughout the bend, that makes it still more stronger.

So I have new glasses now but for a week I’d gone back to an ancient maybe 25 year old pair which were before my broken nose. I think they’re actually the pair that mean I still have 2 intact eyes, because they withstood the impact of a cricket ball. And I can still read in them ! The misalignment (my nose is still 2mm off centre) leads to headaches though and a rationing of that rational thought.

Pictures. A set of 4, top left showing my red plushie dwagon looking at a comprehensively wrapped and taped cuboid box. Top right, the outside is off and we see dwagon looking at clear white bubble wrap. Bottom left, dwagon is looking at a white box, with a tall camera lens on top. Bottom right. Dwagon is beside camera, with the new long lens fitted pointing upwards and the shorter lens in front.

I’ve had another couple of arrivals and deliveries as well since last time. The Canon R50 did remarkably well at Insomnia, with all of the pictures coming out looking great and most importantly … properly sharp. Love that, people were loving the pictures I was sending out as well.

That’s a big thanks to Geraldine of the MS Maud cruise too, Geraldine was the ship’s photographer and part of the expedition team. Early on in the cruise, Geraldine was leading workshops on how to get great photography pictures out of the cruise. Because it’s not just about the time on the ship, it’s about getting those memories to look at afterwards as well. There were separate workshops for those with DSLR and Mirrorless (like the R50) cameras which I didn’t go to but a couple of tips from the main presentation are things I’ve tried to keep with me … So that’s :

Be selective about the pictures you send to the world. The Insomnia day collected 109 pictures, of which 18 went to the bigger collection on Facebook. That might still be too many for a day :-D. That’s the thing though – people will turn off their attention by picture 25, if they even get that far. With this age of digital photography and big memory cards, take lots of pictures but just show off the best ones. Hold back the mediocre ones or the ones that didn’t quite work.

Composition – it helps a lot to turn on the 3 x 3 grid facility that’ll be in any camera (if you can find it!) Our brains like to see things in certain places in the pictures. The 3 x 3 box grid helps to set everything up for best effect. Maybe that works here …

Picture. We're looking out across a dark grey sea, rippled by waves. Above is a light blue sky, with white clouds dominating. At the horizon, we see the two vertical towers of a bridge that marks the horizon. A faint rainbow can be seen to the right.

Or maybe I need to upgrade my tripod :-). That was from the first little field test of the new lens. It’s a 55-210mm lens to fit the R50 camera. That means it picks up from the maximum zoom of the lens I got with the camera and extends all the way out to get pictures like that of the nearer Severn Bridge between England and Wales. That first bridge is 10km away and you can (on the native resolution ! This is 1/3 height and width) electronically zoom in to see individual suspension bridge cables.

Happy with that, looking forwards to seeing how it does in the cricket at Lords. I took that picture at Portishead’s Battery Point, which has the advantages of 24 hour parking, easy roads to get there and great access to cafes.

Picture. We're looking at the assorted building of a town, clinging to the side of a hill overlooking a very stony beach, with the tide and sea approaching from the lower right.

Good little trip to the sea side, with it taking about an hour for my fingers and eyes to thaw out again. Shoulda brought my scarf :-).

Not sure whether the bridge pic was on the tripod or not but it was a good trip out and test of the new lens. Found some wildlife too :

Picture. We're looking out over a field of light green grass, with centre stage being taken by a black and white bird, looking right. Hedges make up the background.

That’s something we can all do with our cameras as well, with modern ones with so many pixels in the sensors. The native resolution is 6000×4000, that little cut is just the 1078×768 pixels in the middle with it mostly arranged to have Birdy in the centre of the 3×3 grid. The rest of the pictures from the R50 here are the 6000×4000 reduced to 2000×1333.

I might be looking at my tripod though because it was being very awkward to adjust it to the optimal angle. It’s gone a bit stiff and there’s a huge change in angle when you tighten it all up. Perhaps fixable by taking it apart, might be looking at one with a ball joint instead though. That’s one for when I go hunting for pictures of the stars again though, wonder when I’ll get that chance ? (It’ll need a late night trip now – lots of daylight)

Thinking of late night trips …

Picture. We're looking at a collection of five boxes, all different colours with Naked Marshmallow banners and the flavours marked. In the centre, the head of our red plushie dwagon is poking out.

Last delivery – a consignment of goodies from the Naked Marshmallow Co. At the back, there are Chocolate Orange and Mini Egg marshmallows. In front, Vanilla Bean, Candy Floss and Salted Caramel. I’ve gone through the Candy Floss and Mini Egg marshmallows already, on to the Salted Caramel and they are as lush as you can imagine them being. More from Naked Marshmallow, thoroughly recommend them and they still have some last chance sales going.

Link to camping ? I knew I wasn’t going to be in so I opted for the “deliver to pick up”, with the chosen spot being the camping place. (I’m not going to give them free advertising this time). A wonderful recent video discovery has been Wildbeare (youtube link). She’s a lovely person who goes off for camping expeditions and comes out with fun, quick videos to capture the adventures. Hugely recommend giving her a watch, both for the lovely chilled out vibes and also for very honest and open opinions on how the gear does in the conditions she takes the gear into.

They’re inspiring stuff and picking stuff up from the camping place let me evaluate with my own eyes what’s available and what kind of size and weight it might be. Cos chasing those stars is looking like it might need an overnight in a tent in a place where Dodgy People won’t be.

I think I need to change car though again before I think of doing that … as my current physical condition (aka potato from legacies of the condition of my outsides and pandemic living conditions) would mean I wouldn’t want to be too far from transport. And while Red is a lovely little car, it also suffers from only having 140mm of ground clearance and I’m worried I might tear something off the bottom of it on the more rugged roads and tracks.

Time to close out though (10 minutes left in the Imola World Endurance Champ race). Time for pre dinner noms ?

Picture. Our green dwagon is on the right, adorning an apron with "feed me" written on it. To the left, a faintly pink cube of a fluffy looking marshmallow.

Have a lovely evening everyone.

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