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The first pictures with my new digital camera
April 2003

I bought my Jessop's FasionCam FC130 in Glasgow in March. I started taking pictures straight away but it took a month to get the software under control for downloading the photos to my computer. With my laptop, the new camera and the installation disk teaming up, it was three against one and leaving the instruction booklet in Scotland put me at a further disadvantage. I fought hard. I tried installing with the camera plugged in and then with it plugged out. I tried taking the disk out after instalation and leaving it in. I tried it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I tried it when I was drunk and when I was sober. In the end I won.

 

I started getting to grips with the camera in the gardens of Haddow House in Aberdeenshire. Here are some nice old beech trees...

...and here's a duck.     After Haddow House, I visited the Scottish Sculpture Centre at Lumsden. This would have been a good picture if I hadn't cut the head off. I got the view finder figured out after that...

When I got back to Almaty I tried out the macro feature which lets you take really close up pictures. This is a cactus I got for my birthday a few years ago. It grows very slowly.   I experimented with the flash on the doors of one of our wardrobes. I painted the palm trees on them last summer.

I got some free 'muck about with your photos' software with the camera. I did a bit of mucking about with Arcsoft Photo Impression 2000 and here are the results. These are two maps I've got on the wall of my study and in the middle is a picture of some of my herbs and spices. Nice and bright, eh?

There are a lot of different things you can do with the programme and I'll need some more time to figure everything out.

This is what happened to the picture at the top left of this page after I pressed the 'magic mushrooms' button.