Picture Perfect

Good morning, my friends. It was kind of a mish-mash of a day. Things seemed out of order, and not everything was accomplished. It hardly matters. My calendar is flexible. 

The only sewing I did yesterday was slow sewing. I finished the upper right corner section, and now I’ve moved my hoop down to capture the “LOVE” section.

The bird feeders were empty, and I wanted to check on the vegetable garden. My sun-dappled cat was already lounging outside when I made my way to the garden.

Since I wasn’t going to get another chance to hoe the garden until Wednesday, I decided it needed to be done. That meant delaying the rest of the cherries until after lunch, but they’re done now. That’s all I’ll do with them this year. Below are 7 pints of cherries in simple syrup. There was another pint, but I can only fit 7 in my canner. I decided to just refrigerate the one remaining. It’s just a good excuse to eat that one right away.

Okay, and when the canning was finished, a delivery arrived. I’ve been in the market for a new camera. My old Panasonic got messed up on one of our trips when it got some fine grain sand into the telescoping lens mechanism. I had it repaired, but it hasn’t worked right since. For the past several months I’ve been using an old Nikon Coolpix, but I’ve never been happy with it. It takes terrible close-up shots. And all of that to say I’ve been looking for a good point and shoot camera. They seem terribly expensive right now…tariffs, you know. In any case, I finally settled on this Panasonic LUMIX FZ80D. It’s a larger camera than I wanted, but it still falls into the point and shoot category. It’s a fixed lens camera, and it works very much like my previous Panasonic camera

Taking it out of the box, I turned it on. It barely had any battery power, but enough for a short time. It prompted me to set the date, time, and location. It went through a few more prompts, but I simply turned to my right from where I was sitting and took this shot. Sadie was napping there on the geriatric kitty pole.

So I plugged it in and charged the battery for a bit. Then, I took it outside and took some random shots. It has a nice grip that felt good in my hand. I was standing a distance back for this shot of the purple hydrangea…maybe 15 feet away. I wanted to see how well the zoom function worked.

From the same spot, I zoomed in on this one flower. Pretty sharp.

Walking around to the front of the house, I was about 30 yards from the bird feeder. The feeder happened to be in shadow at the time. Still, it was able to get a pretty sharp image of the goldfinch.

As I stood there, this robin landed on the vegetable garden fence. Here, I was standing about 50 yards away. I’m pretty happy with the detail in the bird’s feathers and feet.

Then I zoomed in closer, which puts me into the digital zoom mode. It’s not as sharp, but not too bad either.

And then…what the heck, here’s a shot of the corn.

Turning a little to my left, these are the beans. The sprinkler was running, making things kind of bright.

So I turned down the exposure compensation. It’s not so different at this setting…maybe a little less glare. Mainly, I was just testing the different functions to see if they worked as expected.

Walking back toward the house, I stopped to get this Shasta daisy. It was breezy and it was blowing back and forth. Still, it did a pretty good job with this close-up. My Nikon camera would have produced a white blur.

Here’s our friend the Edda clematis, still blooming away. The next three shots were taken zooming in closer and closer to check its close-up capability.

Closer.

Even closer. I’m pretty happy with how these shots turned out.

Walking across to the dahlias, I took a close-up of the Fuzzy Wuzzy dahlia.

This one was for show and tell. It’s our crazy calla lily. It has put up another new leaf, and to the left, another shoot. Maybe we’ll see a flower eventually. It’s pretty when it blooms.

Finally…these petunias. They were along the way as I walked back to the house, and so I took their picture. No other reason.

Okay, so everything seems to be working properly, and I’m happy with the close-up capability. I spent some time reading through the manual last night. It has some “scene” settings I’d like to experiment with, but that will have to wait a day or two. Today Matthew and I are meeting up for our walk postponed from last week. I’m also dropping some donation quilts off, and I expect all of that will take up most of my day. When I can get back to my sewing, I want to sew the binding on Ruth’s Legacy, and then spend some time looking at the new project I have in the wings…the Butterfly Garden.

Speaking of the Butterfly Garden project, my friend, “Crew at Cabin Central,” made a comment yesterday that motivated me to do a reverse image search for this quilt pictured in yesterday’s post. I can’t remember where or when I saw this picture, but this is the quilt I’m going to make.

With a reverse image search, I was able to find the original pattern. The pattern is called “Arcade,” and it can be purchased here. The original pattern is for a lap-sized quilt. I’ll be making mine larger than that.

Okay, so if I’m going to have time for slow-stitching before I leave, then I must get going on it. I’m looking forward to seeing Matthew, and it’ll be a good opportunity to give my new camera a workout. I’m hoping to have some good pictures to show tomorrow.