There were too many trees in the Forest

I woke up to something rather unusual this morning....... sunshine, that's bloody what. After weeks of grey cloud and rain, it was fabulous to finally get my share of the big warm yellow thing that normally hangs around in Australia and California.

I immediately hatched up a plan. It involved being outdoors and playing with gadgets, so it was almost as good as a 'Hot and Spicy' pizza from Dominos.

Yep, I decided I was going to take my new Canon S95 to nearby Bernwood Forest to play with the settings.

Pic.No.1 Bernwood Forest

When I arrived clutching my camera, the sun was streaming through the trees even though there was a chill in air. I took several pictures before realising something; my subject matter was somewhat limited ...... to trees. In fact, all the pictures that I took looked like this one.......

Pic.No.2 Lots of trees in a Forest? Blimey, I hadn't seen that one coming

There was one exception, and that was the picture below. I had found a button on my camera that took black and white pictures but with a twist: You could choose one colour to show up amidst the black and white. In the instance below, I chose 'green' which is why you could see the moss on the forest floor, but everything else was monochromatic. How cool was that?

Pic.No.3 The 'Make Everything Black and White Except for One Colour' Setting. I am going to call this artwork 'Pensive Dog'

After accidentally getting myself totally lost in the forest for over an hour and half (understandable given that the only landmarks are trees, and now I understand the Blair Witch Project), I finally navigated my way back to the car and decided to go somewhere more 'open' to try out my camera settings.

So I drove to a village called 'Brill', perched atop a large hill in the middle of the Oxfordshire countryside. Brill is famous for its windmill, and I wanted to take pictures of that because it dates back to 1635AD, but it was so busy that I decided to drive to the outskirts of the village and take pictures of the panorama instead.

And this is what came out; loads of pictures of the same shot, but with different camera settings... (how exciting!)

Pic.No.4 Miniature Setting (it blurs the top and bottom of the photo, but I am still not sure why you would want to do that)

Pic.No.5 Fish Eye Setting (it distorts the top and bottom of the photo so that they look curved. Again, I am not sure why you would want to do that)

Pic.No.6 'Make Everything Purple Setting'. Ok I lied about that setting. I am not quite sure what setting I had on when I took this picture, or why it made everything go purple

Pic.No.7 Nostalgia Setting. Apparently, everything is supposed to look nostalgic, but it doesn't really look nostalgic in this picture

Pic.No.8 Poster Setting. This setting is supposed to make the photograph look like a poster that you would, well, post on the wall. I can't see why though

Pic.No.9 Super Vivid Setting. This setting is supposed to make all the colours really bright

Pic.No.10 Standard Landscape Setting. This picture shows the default settings if you are taking a picture of a landscape

So all in all, I was a bit disappointed with the differences in settings. It wasn't until I got home and read the camera manual that I realised I had properly cocked up: For each setting, there is a sub-menu which allows you to exaggerate or weaken the special effects. And as a default, each setting on the camera is set at the weakest sub-menu setting (does that make sense?). 

So in effect, I wasn't really giving each setting a proper 'test drive'.

Never mind, I will get there soon. In the meantime, here are two pictures that I took on my way home.

Pic.No.11 Medieval cottages in a village called Horton-cum-Studley (LOL yeh, I know, the village has the word 'cum' in its name. Excellent)

Pic.No.12 The parish church in 'Stanton St John'; the village next to Forest Hill

I tell you, the amount of blog space that I giving to my Canon Powershot S95 camera, they should be paying me to review it (apart from the fact that I don't have any technical knowledge about it). But that is just picky.