I like taking photos of things up close

One of the functions I have always loved on my cameras is the macro mode. I've always had this fascination with taking pictures up close of really small things. When we got back from the park the other day I had bits of dried grass all down my top from where I'd been lying down trying to get the right angle on some tiny flowers.

I especially like taking photos of insects. Here are some of my up-close shots:






The beetle in the third photo down was actually in my sleeping bag crawling up my leg. That was a very eerie feeling.

One day I want one of those lenses that lets you take photos of really tiny things like individual ants and so forth. My ant shots haven't worked out well so far, but I haven't tried yet with my new camera. That will be my next excursion - shooting ants :-)

My New Camera - The Olympus SP-570UZ

For a while now I've been mucking about photographically with a little point and click digital. It was a great beginner camera that I loved. It worked underwater, in sandy conditions, after I dropped it that time...

But the camera store near me just had a special on new cameras and I really wanted an SLR camera with a higher megapixel count. I convinced the love of my life Matt that what we really needed wasn't a sofa (pft, what's wrong with the floor I ask you?) but a shiny new Olympus SP-570 Ultra Zoom. Weirdly enough, he agreed. There's a good run down of it's features here but the things I love about it are:

- 10 megapixels!!! (That's 10 reaally big pixels, right?)
- 20x Optical Zoom
- to use the zoom you have to physically turn the lens, not just press buttons. It's a nice feeling, like you're an old times photographer in one of those awesome films about how fun it was being a star reporter back in the 40s.

Yesterday Matt, Greg and I went on a picnic with the baby and I took so many photos! Of course the image sizes are larger on my new camera but I still managed to fill my 2 gig memory card, mostly just by saying "ooh, what does this setting do?". We tried out the fast capture mode by pushing the pram around really fast but we decided that was a bad idea with the baby actually in the pram. Here are some pics from the day: