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Handsome sized Salvia Keith. Name and £ - if you don't mind me asking please?
Jenny

 

Are you ready for this?
Salvia conferiflora and "Black Knight" - £2.95 each!

 

Very very nice oooohh Black Knight....

 

The Fuchsias are;
F.coccinea
F.denticulata
F.boliviana (I already have a F.boliviana "Alba" thanks to PeterS)
F.thalia
F.colonsoi purpurescens

All at £1.85 each.

I really recommend them - think that it was Bilbo who tipped us off about these guys.

 

Great thumbs up
thank you Keith,
Jenny

 

I bought a few Fuchsias off Other Fellow last year and can also recommend the service

Today I am off to Costco to buy cat and bird food. I am hoping they don't have any plants in that I want or I won't be able to resist.

 

Just as well you didn't as there are good deals on The Net ...

I was just about to purchase based on a link from a camera review site (to Wex Photographic) for £359. Looked like I could get £50 cashback from Cannon. Seemed like a stonkingly good deal ... then at the last moment "had a look around" and Amazon and John Lewis both sell at around £360 too ... but Google offered me eGlobal Digital at £250 (including a BUYNOW5 £5 voucher which the checkout offered me after I dithered and went backwards and forwards from basket to accessories several times ). Canon have declined my application £50 cashback for the supplier "Not being UK" - which is somewhat improbably given that my order placed on Monday was here by 10am Tuesday however I'm still 50-quid better off than taking the highstreet offers.

That caused me to question the Extras (spare battery, lens hood, 16GB high speed SD card, USB cable [astonishing that Canon no longer include that]) which were more expensive on eGlobal than Wex ... I've no qualms about buying them off eBay using a cheapest-retailer policy and Brand X products. Lens Hood from eGlobal Digit = £32.99, Brand X on eBay = £1.37 (including delivery from Hong Kong!!)

I had an SX30 before and both of them switch to macro automatically, which is rather nice. You just move closer ... and closer! Just tried the current one and it keeps focusing until the lens is touching the object (I get a Flower Icon appear in the viewfinder, so that must indicate when it switches from normal to macro mode, but in moron-mode I don't think a user would notice any difference.



Camera as close to the screen as it will go (i.e. "touching"). I reduced the image to 800 x 600 and 70% quality, but its full frame (hand held)



a 100% crop of a bit in the middle (also reduced to 70% quality). I didn't know my laptop screen looked like that close up!!

 

I found the eGlobal site too last night cheapest I have found and free delivery - agree the SD cards are a bit pricey - found 16gb for this cam on Amazon for just under a tenner - (am trying to justify to hubby that I really need this cam at the moment - although he knows if I want it I will have it). Have showed him your shots - he agrees fantastic. I am saying not sure how long the "offer" on eGlobal will be there for so need to act promptly before they run out

Mind you - I am just a point and click photographer - don't understand all the settings - normally set to auto - zoom and click - can you tell me would this be OK ? or did you need to do different settings to get those close-up shots above ?

S

 

The previous camera I had was the SX30, so basically an earlier version of this one, so some of my comments relate to that, much is similar its just more-of-the-same in the new one, and obviously I haven't had time to discover some of this on the new one as yet. So far it has been "the same only better".

I think what I call its "moron-mode" is superb. I owned an SLR yonks ago and joined the photography club at school as a teenager, and I did get some "tuition" in how to use a camera. Thus I understand f-stops and aperture vs shutter speed, film-speed, depth of field and so on. The camera has all sorts of manual-modes ... but in fact I have almost never used them.

Case in point:

I turned the camera on, pointed it at my laptop (there is daylight in my home office, but its overcast today, flash was not on), moved the camera towards the laptop and as I did so it auto-focused. At some point I got the little flower icon in the viewfinder (to tell me it had switched to Macro mode), there was no other apparent change though, as I moved closer it kept auto-focusing and eventually I got to the point when the lens touched the screen! and given that I couldn't get any closer I pressed the shutter! Its really that simple, properly "moron-mode" as far as I am concerned!

When I take a photograph of a scene there is some crafty scene-sensing-stuff. I've no idea if it is important, or does anything significant, but I just let it get on with it. The results have always been fine.

Supposedly this stuff will also mean that it won't take portraits of people when they blink, and if you take self-timed pictures (e.g. put camera on a tripod and then run round so you are in the picture too) in addition to the old fashioned "wait 5 seconds" it can also do "When an addition face [i.e. yours] appears" or "when you wink".


As I have had Canon PowerShots before, and this is very similar, I hadn't even opened the manual until now. I've now had a look in the manual and it seems to imply that it will auto-detect People (separately for In Motion, Shadows on their face, Smiling, Sleeping, Babies either Smiling or Sleeping, and Children in motion). For some of those it will additionally sense if there is backlight, a dark scene or spotlights. For other subjects it will auto detect motion and Close range, and for general subjects Back light, Dark, Sunset and Spotlight. I have no idea how well it auto-senses any of that, and what it does when it has decided that's what the subject is! If you can be bothered (I never did with the old one, which had many of those too) you can manually select the "scene".

The video mode is full HD, and I think there is a slow motion mode - which sounds fun. Can't imagine that you would need a separate video camera. There is a dedicated Video button so you can be in the middle of some stills photography and just push the Video button the moment the opportunity presents itself (or you can select Video mode and fuss with the settings if you need to - I never did with the old one, but all that means is that I didn't feel the need, not that my movies might not have been better if I had bothered!). You can also be taking a video and press the shutter for a "still" (the video pauses I think). Not sure why one would need to be Hey! its there. Get the proper high-speed SD card if you want to do movies (but both Wex and eGlobal were a lot more expensive than other sites for those ... I definitely want a pucker brand one for my SD card though ... but a cheap price is OK by me!)


Some points that you might want to note:

Its chunky. It won't fit in your pocket. Having said that it is neither "large" nor "heavy". Its pretty much the same size and weight as my previous one. But it is a Bridge camera, not a Compact.

The lens is "slower" [I mean photographically speaking, the zoom speed and auto-focus is phenomenally quick] than the previous one. This is because of the increase in the zoom magnification. Like for like with the lens open as wide as possible (I put them side by side to check) the new one is one full f-stop slower. What that means is that in poor light, and with the lens open as wide as it will go, the old one would have had a shutter speed of, say, 1/60th (easy to hand hold) and the new one will be 1/30th (getting harder to hand hold). Having said that a) the image stabilisation is more sophisticated, so you may actually be able to hand-hold a slower shutter speed anyway, and b) it has an insane max ISO of 6,400. (ISO is what used to be the "speed" of the film, dunno how that translates to the digital age. With film I used to use 100 film in good bright light (holiday's in the tropics), 200 at home around the garden etc., 400 if I was going to be using flash etc. at night, and I once bought some 1,600 for some animal shots from a hot air balloon at dawn, where, clearly, flash was not going to be any good. 6,400 is a bit off the scale compared to those! However, the higher the ISO number the more grainy the pictures, so its a compromise. Moron-mode adjusts the ISO automatically ... and has a sensible cutoff, so to actually get the benefit of 6,400 you would have to use manual mode, as your images will be so grainy you'll probably hate them!, thus only available in manual mode / conscious choice. All seems like very sensible things for Point-and-shoot to me.

Points I like (available on previous model too):

Viewfinder. Personally I prefer a viewfinder to using the preview screen. Note that the viewfinder is a crappy low resolution display, but that's never bothered me, I'm only trying to "frame" the picture and not cut off the subjects feet - or head!. Its has a twiddly dioter dial to adjust for you eyesight / glasses.

Preview screen. Button to select viewfinder, preview screen, both; you can also select with/without a grid, display of the histogram of the colours, blah blah blah. The preview screen is tilt-and-turn. You can park it with screen facing-in, so it doesn't get scratched, or facing out and then use it as the viewfinder / preview and also to review images you have taken. You can flip it out alongside - either to preview like that, or by angling it you can then hold the camera above your head, to be able see the preview whilst making an over-the-heads-of-the-crowd shot. In fact you can even turn it round to face the "wrong way" and point the camera at yourself and see the preview whilst making a self portrait of you and your mates grinning like Cheshire cats

Software. Downloads to one-folder per day (you have to configure that, the default is something slightly different). During download you get to add a suffix (only one for all the newer-since-last-time photos). So if you've just come back from a wedding you can put "MyMatesWedding" in and you will get a folder called "2013-05-18 MyMatesWedding" with all of today's happy snaps in it.

I don't use any of the image management tools (other than Download - you could just take the SD card out and copy them manually though ...), I used to use the Panorama stitching tool, but I found that I prefer the freebie Microsoft ICE tool for that job.

Talking of Panorama: in that mode (it does NOT autosense that that is what you are planning to do, ESP is not going to be available until a future model, my ESP is telling me that !!!) after you take the first photo the viewfinder shows you half of the previous image and the other half what is in the viewfinder. Thus you can easily line-up for your next / subsequent shot in sequence. All the images in the panorama set are downloaded to a separate sub-folder, which makes it know what comprises the Set when stitching them back together again
Framing Assist button. When you zoom right in to 100x it is quite hard to keep the subject within the frame, and you wind up pointing the thing in all directions trying to hopelessly re-acquire the subject!! The Framing Assist button momentarily zooms out so you can get the subject centre-screen and then zooms back in for you to take the photo. Good idea!





Built in Flash. Also a hot-shoe if you want to put a more poncy flash gun on it.

That's about all I can think of in terms of it achieving "Moron-mode". I'll bring it to Shiney's open day (aging memory permitting) in case anyone wants a try-before-you-buy.

 

SOLD ....... Love the fact that the macro comes on automatically when you get close enough - and slow-motion video ? Such fun - the grandchildren will love that and it will prompt me into learing the editing side in my Photoshop.

Ha Ha - I have showed Mr S all your posts here - I actually said you know I'm getting it - he answered that he knew that - and didnt know why I asked in the first place - He knows me well !!!

Armandii - you know you men love it when women take control (sometimes).

Excitedly, already told my son I was getting a new camera - he said Nooooooo - I said he could have my Lumix - he already has my old Nikon that he loves but I know he will love the Lumix more.

I feel this new camera will be easier for me - bought an extension lens for the Lumix to zoom closer but at about 4"+ long it is a bit clumsy for me once screwed on and obviously a bit heavier plus the photos were slightly hazy.

Never had a Canon camera before though so should be fun - already have my fuji compact so not bothered about size - expecting it to be similar to the Lumix/Nikon.

So - excitedly, I'm off to eGlobal now - then to Amazon ......

S

 

Thus think, in the old days you would have to trog off to the High Street

 

Crikey they were a bargain Longk, great size plants, must have missed Bilbo's recommendation so I'm off have a look now

 

A local village had its annual plant sale today and here is my haul;

A well rooted purple Hebe cutting for 30p.....................


Sempervivum for £1.00....................


Pride of place though goes to this Opuntia for a quid!


Plus a bag of moss for 50p...................