Reader, I purchased it.

The folks at the camera shop assured me that it would probably cost as much to fix the old one as to buy this, and I believed them. Very willingly.

So here are the first efforts and impressions. Yes, it really is better, though whether that will show up in Blogger I don't know. It is light as a whipped soufflé, thanks to super-dooper new battery technology. It's remarkable how things move along in three years. It has a whole array of fancy settings, some of them really quite funny, like a special Baby one, where you can log the info like Baby's age etc, and you get a toned down flash and fluffed up skin tones, and then you get a Baby 2 setting in case you have another one, then just so the child-free dog-lovers like me don't feel left out there's a similar mode for pets! There's also a 'pinhole camera' effect which looks fun...

The first thing I was very anxious to get sorted out was to find the place in the menu to turn all the volumes down to zero, all those totally artificial shutter whirrs and zooming noises and bleeps and jingles. Why do they do that? One of the things I've always loved about taking digital pics was the silence, so no one knows if your taking one or not, and there is as little intrusion as possible.

It feels a little ponderous, the focus and the zoom. The buzzard a few photos down was one of a pair going over which should have been a gift with the extra zoom power, flying low with the sun under their wings, but by the time I fixed on one they's almost gone. But I guess I just need to get used to it. The 10 megapixels make for gigantic great files, so I must be really conscientious about backing up and throwing out.

So, just some things round and about:


Sumac,

rose,

nasty old maize plants, time they were gone,

field at the bottom of the garden,

said buzzard,

backlit decay in a hellebore leaf,

grass heads,

late peacock on late marigolds,

liquidamber, such a lovely name.

I thin that Lumix and I are going to have fun...