Messin around with the new camera.

I charged the battery and loaded the SD card and took this shot out the back door.  See why I can’t hardly stand to be here in KC!  Sooooo close to the neighbors!  Outside of the folks next door with the deck, I’ve never spoken to any of the people in the houses behind us since we came here four years ago.



I went over and sat in my chair in the corner of the family room and shot a picture of the kiddy toys for the grand kids.  This is a 25mm wide angle shot, as our room is not really this big.  The green turtle is about 8 feet away from me.



Ok so I zoomed in on the turtle, with the 12x optical zoom being careful not to get into the digital zoom that reduces pixels.



Ya gotta be kidding me, that is the equal of 300mm in a 35mm film camera. 

I rode the bike over to the motorhome storage place.  I needed to exercise the leveler jacks and start the engine for a while.  It has been a month since it was started.

Get me outa here dad!             

The fellow with the rig next to me was gone, so I could take a picture from the side.  I still had to use the wide angle some, and it makes it look longer.



I ran the engine and the generator with the roof airs.  I put the legs down and manually leveled the coach.  Then I tried to store the level point.  But of course it would not store.  I read the manual, and the big book that Tiffin wrote as an owners manual, but still could not get it to store.  Then as I studied it carefully, It said that I had to do a step before anything else would work.  So I dropped back and re did that step again.  And that’s what it wanted as it stored the position immediately.

I retracted the legs like I was leaving, and then turned them back on and pushed Auto Level.  And just like that it leveled up and went off.  It appears that my problems up in Des Moines have been cleared out of the memory.

Later tonight, I rode out to Heritage Park South of us in Overland Park. I took several shots of the sunset.  The beauty of this camera for us non professional folks is its IA mode.  That is intelligent automatic.




Not only does it control the exposure, it judges the picture and selects one of its many scene modes to correctly shoot the photo.  In these shots it had correctly decided that this was a sunset. It went into sunset mode, and adjusted the ISO of the CCD sensor to 400 with a shutter speed to match.  I was on the motor scooter and just pressed the shutter release.



Again the camera did better in IA mode than me messing around with the manual settings.  I had the ISO too slow, and it didn’t look as natural.  I tried Aperture preferred and Shutter preferred, but still didn’t get the contrast that the IA selected sunset scene provided in full automatic.



I messed with the Picassa settings on these photos but mostly didn’t change too much.  The shots really didn’t need much tuning to be very acceptable.  That is quite a change from the older cameras.
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Loyce came back home tonight, but is quite tired as I don’t think she slept all that well at her sisters house. She’s gone up to bed already, so I am being quiet down here tonight.

I think the Panasonic ZS7 is a keeper, as it seems to be fairly intuitive as to how to run everything, but I have not used the movie part yet.  Making movies will take some further study of the manual, which is on the CD rom.  I only read the short paper booklet that came with it in several languages.

But if you could learn the whole thing in a ten minute sitting, it wouldn’t be nearly as fun.  There needs to be yet another trick that I didn’t know around every turn.  I have been pressing buttons like a kid messing with his cell phone, all night.

I wonder if it will play space invaders??????

Retired Rod