Shopping in Keswick

It was a beautiful morning, the sun was shining from a cloudless blue sky and it felt warm, although the temperature was just above freezing. Olga and I decided to go to Keswick, which is one of my favourite places in the entire world, and where I'd live if property prices weren't astronomical. Though being a conservation area in a national park and surrounded by mountains it is probably one of the worst locations for ham radio imaginable.

I thought we would go for a stroll through the town and have a coffee and a look in the shops, which we did, but I also spent rather a lot of time standing around being bored while Olga looked at clothes. I loathe shopping, and would buy everything possible - including groceries - online if I could. If I decide I need something I generally purchase the first thing I see that will do the job. Olga has to examine every possible candidate and then agonizes over the decision for hours. Consequently we rarely buy anything for the house requiring a joint decision as I have usually lost interest in buying anything after my first couple of suggestions have been rejected.

In Keswick we saw very little evidence of any damage caused by the November floods - unlike the devastation that occurred in our home town Cockermouth. We walked down to the lake, where I took this picture using my phone, since I wasn't carrying the camera. The ducks and geese are very tame and you can walk right up to them. I'm sure they would take food from your hand if you had any.

Luna

It is a clear but cold (-4C!) night tonight and a full moon is shining. I thought I would try to take a picture of it using my £29 Aldi spotting scope and £25 eBay bargain digital camera. It made a nice change from trying to figure out how to interface my radio to my new computer.

The digiscoping adapter I got from Scopes'n'Skies certainly helped with holding the camera in position and the infra red remote control I managed to get for the camera meant that I could fire the shutter when everything was steady. It's not bad for a first attempt but I'm sure it ought to be possible to get the image a bit sharper.

My camera tripod is really poor and hard to adjust so you have to point past the object and then hope it settles back with it in the centre. This normally takes a few attempts. But the main thing is that focus is quite critical and it's hard to tell when you have got it exactly right using the little screen on the back of the camera.

There was a bit of colour fringing on the original image - purple at the top and green at the bottom. Well I suppose you can't expect perfection with £29 optics. I eliminated it using the simple expedient of getting IrfanView to convert the image to greyscale.

It would probably be more interesting to photograph a partial moon when you could see detail emphasized by shadows along the terminator. So, weather permitting, I hope to try to take some more Moon photos later.

Fieldfare!

This morning's snow is already melting so I had to act quickly to catch a picture of our winter visitors before they depart. This was one of the results. You can see some vignetting on the left hand side (I didn't want to risk the bird flying off while I tried to eliminate it) but it is the best picture I have made yet.

This morning I had the great pleasure of meeting fellow bloggers Adam, M6RDP and Paul, PC4T for the first time on the air - also a rare excursion on to SSB for me! Conditions were very up and down, and for much of the time both stations were down in the noise and hard to copy even with the K3 DSP noise reducer, but at times Adam's signal was peaking over S9 - very good for 10W.

It will be nice to make this a more regular event under hopefully better conditions.

More snow!

We had almost lost all the snow that fell over the previous couple of weeks. But last night there was a fresh snowfall and we awoke to a couple of inches of the white stuff.

It does make for a nice picture - the photo above is the view from our front door this morning - but I had hoped we had seen the last of it and that we might return to the mild temperatures we normally get. (I can remember winters when we hardly ever had a frost.)

The streets where we live have not been gritted and as you can see from the picture we are on a hill. Fortunately we don't have to go anywhere except for into the town now and again for supplies which we can do on foot. Otherwise I think I would be starting to regret exchanging the Suzuki 4x4 that we had for our present small lightweight two wheel drive Hyundai which is not really designed for such conditions.

First attempt at digiscoping

Adam, M6RDP caught my interest the other day when he wrote about a digital camera adapter that lets you take photos through the eyepiece of binoculars or a telescope. There have been many times I wished I could take a picture of what I could see through the spotting scope when watching birds. I decided to investigate and ended up at the same site where Adam bought his binoculars. The adapter pictured on his blog was on sale for under £30. That is a lot less than other similar products so I decided to get one now rather than regret not getting it later.

The gadget came this morning. First attempts to use it were a little disappointing. It wasn't really designed for my camera which has the lens very close to the bottom of the body. With the camera platform as high as it would go the camera still could not see into the eyepiece properly. In the end, I cut a strip from a cork drinks coaster (sorry, Olga) to go between the camera and the platform and raise it by an extra few millimetres which was just enough to get the image centered.

The next problem I found is that operating the shutter moved the camera / telescope giving a blurred image. Eventually I hit on the idea of using the shutter delay so that everything had stopped shaking by the time the picture was taken. This is not ideal for taking pictures of birds which are guaranteed not to stay in the same position for several seconds! Nevertheless I did manage to take one good picture of a robin on the bird feeder, which I think is not bad for a first attempt at digiscoping on a grey day, taken through a double-glazed window from inside the conservatory.

Opportunity in obsolescence

Photography has never been a great interest of mine, nor have I ever had much of a knack for it. About ten years ago I bought a Kodak DC280 digital camera to take pictures I could email to friends or use on websites. It was a 2.3 megapixel camera that could create 1760 x 1168 images and cost, if I remember, an eye-watering £500. It is still working but wasn't used all that much and until recently I never had the slightest interest in replacing it.

After starting this blog I realized that it would be nice to have photos to accompany some of my postings. Because the DC280 is about the size and weight of a half-brick I rarely bother to take it with me on outings. Nor can it focus down very close so it can't produce nice sharp pictures of electronic bits and pieces. So I started thinking about finding a new, compact replacement with a good macro facility. But I didn't want to spend much money on it.

The local discount store Aldi had a Traveler brand camera for about £60 which was the right sort of price. But I could not find out if it had a macro facility and it had a ridiculous number of megapixels. I think the top digital cameras now are about 12 megapixels, while even budget models like this Traveler have 7 or 8Mp.

I really don't know why compact cameras used for holiday and family snaps need such a high resolution. The pictures they take aren't going to appear in National Geographic. They take up a lot more space on the memory card or computer hard drive and need to be reduced to fit the screen. What's the point? But whenever you talk to someone about digital cameras the first thing they ask is "how many megapixels has it got?"

I started looking through eBay and found a new Pentax Optio S30 for sale. Pentax is a good brand and the S30 had good reviews. It has 3.2 megapixels, a 3x optical zoom and a super macro mode that focuses down to a few centimetres. It was made in 2004, when it cost around £200. I assume that this one sat on a dealer's shelf for years until the firm went bankrupt or someone had a clearout.

I haven't had much opportunity to try it out yet, but this picture of illuminated reindeer in the grounds of nearby Armathwaite Hall on a typical grey Cumbrian day looks good enough when reduced to a suitable size for web viewing.

I tested the macro capability by taking another picture of my K3's cracked RF gain knob. As you can see, it's a lot clearer and sharper than the one taken by my wife's Canon Ixus. So I think the Pentax is going to be able to do everything I want.

The price I paid for this quality camera that lacks only a fashionably high megapixel count? Just £25, or one twentieth of what the Kodak DC280 cost a decade ago! The seller has 4 more left!

I found I can also save on accessories. The camera didn't include a memory card, and it can only take an SD card up to 1GB. All the websites advertising cheap 1GB SD cards were out of stock of the cheap ones. I decided 512MB would be enough for me, and was able to pick up a Camlink SD Camera Kit on Amazon for just £2! Yes, £2 for a 512MB SD card, a USB card reader, a desktop tripod, a lens cleaning kit and a camera case. There are 4 more of those left, too.

How quickly technology items become worthless, able to be sold only at giveaway prices. But if you aren't bothered about having the latest spec it's clear you can get yourself some bargains.