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Photos from pth15 on 2011-Jun28:
Photos from the fen on pth15 on 2011-Jun28:
Photos from Jackpine-forest on pth15 on 2011-Jun28:
Photos from The-Cusson municipal gravel-pit near Wye MB on 2011-Jun28:
-- the Bee-mimic flower-beetle (Trichiotinus assimilis) in photo 18077 (being stalked by the crab-spider) is considerably smaller than the one in photos
18081, 18082, and others of the species I have photographed;
-- the Syrphid-fly in photo 18083 is a different individual (and of a different species) than the one in photos 18087, 18088, 18089, 18091;
Photos from East-Braintree-Rd on 2011-Jun28:
Photos from pr308 on 2011-Jun28:
-- the first plant with red-and-white (as opposed to pink-and-white) flower is also unusual for its wide leaves, its lower leaves being as wide as long;
I have no idea whether these characteristics tend to go together;
Photos from Ames cottage in Wye MB on 2011-Jun28:
Notes:
My camera's auto-focus kept missing the "unidentified Grass" subject, and this led me to think about the sort of auto-focus I would like:
it would not have 51 focus-points (like the fancy Nikon D3s), rather it would have just one, in the exact centre, which would be marked with a fine-lined cross-hair
symbol as found in a rifle-scope; using a camera so equipped would not come naturally to the photographer who is used to first locking the camera on a tripod
positioned to "frame" the desired shot; however for a non-tripod-user like me it would be just plain wonderful, ever so much simpler, and ever so much less
aggravating; aha, the Nikon dSLR models offer "Single-Point AF" which must be what I want; I may have to get one.
I was hoping Nikon would follow up on the E5700 approach, putting the features a serious photographer wants into a scaled-down digital camera; since there is no good reason for the digital sensor to be the exact same size as 35mm-film (other than lens-compatability), why not employ a smaller sensor, thereby giving us smaller lighter lenses; I want the features of a dSLR camera but I do not want to carry that many kilograms of gear...
Their P80/P90/P100/P500 models have the desired size and weight, and come with a do-everything lens, currently 22.5 to 810 in 35mm-equivalent terms (36X), that gets improved yearly at both ends, however Nikon over-did the cost-cutting by discarding Raw-mode (and a few other things a serious photographer wants such as "Single-Point AF"); furthermore, the AF-assist-lamp, introduced with the P90, is a bad joke in that it is positioned so that it completely misses a nearby subject!
Nikon's auto-focus algorithm is like optical-character-recognition (OCR) in that I'm disappointed with what I'm using, and keep thinking I should have thrown my computer-programming ability at the problem. Neither problem is easy, yet surely it would be easy to do better than what this crappy soft-/firm-ware does:-) Hmm, if Nikon were to make it open-source, then some bright young person who likes photography, knows computer-programming and a little about the physics of light... (Actually I have no idea to what extent the auto-focus is done in hardware; getting around the limitations may well require a redesign of the hardware bits.)
The Nikon P90 always over-exposes bright yellow subjects, and on some days including today the largest correction -2.0-ev is not enough to avoid a washed-out region on a sun-lit glossy yellow subject.