A walk in the park and cats: 26 - 27 December 2010

After a successful morning of taking snaps of flowers, it was time to head out and actually go for a walk with my new toy slung around my neck. Being in New Zealand, I am actually quite lucky with a range of, what at least to me, seem interesting places to go take some pics.

Armed with still only a read of the manual, I set off at about 5pm on 26 December for a walk up one tree hill which is literally, just a couple of blocks from Simone's house (cue - the U2 song named after the place below), and also the venue of our Wedding reception in January!

Anyway, after a hour or so of auto mode snapping I had quite a number of pics! I experimented a bit with composition in a number of the shots.

Back at Simone's house their cat, Sammy, was in a cute pose on the front porch. Simone ran (carefully) and grabbed my camera and snapped this pic herself:

After realising it was the centre of attention the cat jumped to the lawn so I decided to try and take some pics and play around with the depth settings. I put the camera into AV mode and slid the Aperture down to 4 (as low as it seemed to go). Based on some research here: http://www.slrphotographyguide.com/camera/settings/av-mode.shtml

I now realise the lower the f-number (the apeture number) the more open the lens actually is and the more light that gets in. The result is an in focus subject close to the lens with the background out of focus. Here is the result (just to add to the millions of other pictures of people cats on the Internet!)