Gardening diaries - friendly discussions on topics from latest bloom to wildlife.

You are more than welcome. From memory, it has three CMOS image sensors and a genuine Leica lens, so it is much more than not bad. The colour problem is what leads me to suspect that the white balance is off.

Little known fact, but oranges and yellows are the hardest colours for cameras and displays to deal with, and are one of the first to look 'wrong' when something is amiss. Indeed, when I was in the trade, it was still CRT TV's back then, and we always knew we had set a tube up well when the yellows looked good.

Sorry I can't give you more specific steps to take, but please do ask your son to check the white balance and the resolution. I am always at the end of PM if you think I can help.

 

You should be able to set the colours of the images within the menu of the camcorder, alp, i.e: Natural, Bright, Portrait, Landscape, Vibrant, Muted, Bleachbypass,Reversal film, just like you can in a DSLR.

 

FC is also correct about white balance with adjusts for different light temperatures such as Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, fluorescent, Tungsten, flash, etc.

 

It ain't the camera, longk, it's 95% the photographer and, as everyone will agree, your fantastic pics prove that.

 

I try not to use flash but use what light is available as DSLR sensors [CMOS] are very sensitive .....

Believe it or not, but this pic was taken in deep shade,without flash, and hand held not on a tripod.
I tend to wander around the garden in the early morning or early evening with my camera and a good macro lens when the Sunlight is much gentler.

Quite a few camera sensors do have problems with reds and even in gentle light it's a struggle to get a really good image of a completely red rose.

 

On the other hand...

You can fake some of the technical stuff by cheating (sorry guys )

If you're after doing a close up and want the background to be out of focus you can get the effect (not quite as good) without messing with aperture and shutter speed. You need sufficient light on the subject (whereas you don't when using aperture and shutter speed) and need to stand well away from the subject. Then you zoom right in on the subject, on automatic, and it will place it in focus whilst leaving the background out of focus.

This is a totally unprofessional way of taking photos and nowhere near as detailed a result as doing it the proper way that @ARMANDII and @longk do, but it gets quick results. Given enough time you should learn, by trial and error, how to use the shutter speed and aperture - if you have that facility on your camera.

These are all done by the cheating method

 

@alp Nora Barlow can be a bit awkward to grow (shouldn't be, but is ) and, once grown, tends to keep herself to herself. Not like most other Aquilegia which are very promiscuous.


We used to have rather a lot of Aquilegias but, unfortunately, we lost 6,000 of them to the new, incurable, Aquilegia Downy Mildew. If you spot any of your Aquilegias looking unhappy with the leaves gradually turning white then you need to check on them. If it's mildew then burn or bin them.

Carrie Thomas, who has the national collection, has good information on her website Aquilegia pests and diseases Regretably, some of the photos on her site are from our garden

This is what some parts of our garden used to look like

 

Sadly, nothing as they almost all died of the lurgy We used to let them go to seed and collect the seed (great big bags of them) and give loads of packets of seed away when we opened our garden. Then cut them right down, ready for the next year. The stalks were cut as low as possible and the leaves left until they died back. For purely safety reasons the stalks were cut to the ground as the stems get very woody and can easily cut you when weeding around the plants.

Less than three quarters.

No, just a friend who was visiting at the time.