Garden Picnic

Went to the gym for the first time in over three months. After a pitifully short exercise session we stumbled out into the shopping mall to pick up some groceries and sushi for our picnic today. Armed with 8 rolls of maki, a dirty picnic blanket and our trusty cameras we drove back up to Mount Coot-tha to spend a day at the botanical gardens there.

Following a friend's advice I tried to take all my pictures today in RAW format without any compression. I must say that I doubt I'll do that again as I ran out of space quite quickly on a 1 gig microdrive and it took forever to process the images into JPEG back at my desk.

Alison and I both had lots of fun taking different types of shots which I'll be putting up on Flickr over the next few days. I've really started to notice the drawbacks of using my 350D kit lens (an EF-S 18-55) to take reverse-lens macro shots. Since the lens doesn't have a seperate aperture ring for manual adjustments I basically get ZERO depth of field which is making it very hard to compose my shots. I still get the odd one that I'm happy with but I'd like to think I could do better.



Now I'm considering getting a set of diopter lenses to trial macro shots at the Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers that's going to be on from the 16th of September till the 25th. Alison and I are planning to go up for the last weekend so we'll get to take more flower shots then. :)