An Afternoon With Mary Shelley

Sean and I spent most of yesterday wandering around Bournemouth, taking pictures of EVERYTHING with the Amazing New Camera!!!!!!!! We were lucky: the weather was nice. We ducked into St. Peter's Churchyard, where the boys and I had been to see the Shelleys' tomb, spookily surrounded by gnarled trees and overlooking the church. Apparently, Mary Shelley was originally buried in London, and was moved here. Sean and I met the lady in charge of the five-and-a-half acre grounds, Brenda, who was tidying around the plants and picking up trash. She told us that Percy Shelley was drowned in Italy, and when he was cremated his friend noticed that his heart did not burn. He rescued the heart from the flames, and sent it to Mary who kept it, allegedly, in her desk. Percy's heart was found there after her death, wrapped in a copy of 'Adonais', Percy Shelley's elegy to Keats.

"I weep for Adonais-he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!"

(from 'Adonais' by Percy Shelley... doesn't that make you cry?)

In this shot, you can see that someone has left flowers beside the Shelley tomb. I think I will take some next time I go.

I have a lot to learn with my new camera. I haven't thought about f-stop and aperture since the days before digital, when mum and dad had an Olympus OM2. The Lumix FZ35 works fine as a point-and-shoot (Most of our photos yesterday were taken in either 'Intelligent Auto' Mode, where settings are chosen automatically by the camera, or 'Program AE' Mode, where you can fiddle with exposure and blur your background and play without having too much of a disaster. In both modes, the camera was fast, focus was fast and the images are fine (I have reduced the pixels here). The Zoom is really good and fast too. It would be a waste to use it simply for point-and-shoot though, seeing all of the other fun things that can go on! I'm studying the manual (220 pages, AAARGH!) and reading up in photography magazines, which have great articles on Digital SLR for Dummies.

This camera is terrifyingly light. A good thing if you're going to be holding your arm up while you wait for that squirrel to hop back on to the stump (he did, but refused to pose nicely). It's just strange to hold a bigger camera that doesn't weigh you down.

The other thing I have to learn is the photography software. I am notorious (with the boys) for just taking a shot, reducing the size and slapping it on this blog or printing it out. The boys take my shots, edit them, and say "Look! SEE how much better?" On second thoughts, maybe I'll just let them do it for me :) Anyway, as Christmas prezzies go, I'd say my new camera gets ten out of ten. ELEVEN out of ten!