I hope that you had a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. May you have health, love and happiness throughout the year and beyond.
We went to the kids’ in North Van for Christmas. Les had asked me to take some photos with her Nikon P7100 Coolpix, mainly because every year I have taken all the photos with my Nikon DSLR camera. She does not always get the chance to see them until much later in the New Year.
Shooting with Les’s camera is definitely not a problem for me; I always enjoy the pleasure of using a high quality light camera such as the P7100. It has all three C’s: compact, quick and clear.
The larger aperture of f2.8 allows Les to shoot in low available light without a flash. A lot of the indoor Christmas Day shots were taken with available light, more natural, no startled looks, nobody poses, and so on.
We have discovered that Ollie the cat has a fascination with trains; that is, my electric train. I have the train running around the Christmas tree in a huge loop along with a tunnel that I created out of Monsieur Ollie’s scratching post thingy.
First Monsieur will sit beside the track and watch the train swoosh by. After a bit Ollie will sit with his back to the track and pretends that he doesn’t care about the train. Then for the “pièce de résistance” he strolls over to the tunnel/cat post, sits on it and swats the engine as it emerges from the tunnel.
Les and I took some shots of Monsieur Ollie in action with her Nikon camera, some with available light, some with flash. By the way, that pop-up flash does a magnificent job of balancing the existing light in the room with the flash.
This has been quite an eventful last few weeks for us. The Ford Explorer needs a back-up band in the transmission ($1800 at B&A Transmission—those guys really are the best); we had a sewer backup in the shower and toilet (thank heaven for Jason Wolf at Mclean and Higgins); and the downstairs toilet developed a hairline crack in the tank. Lucky that I spotted it before we were awash in eau de toilette.
I know that this might sound like “payola”, but it is not. I have used these tradespeople and consider them honest, friendly, with fair prices.
On the plus side, we had Christmas with the kids in North Van. We walked to the local liquor store in North Van to get some wine and beer. We took turns: one went into the store and the other one would stand outside with the dog. The owner and his son came out and said, “please, bring the dog in”.
I haven’t heard anyone say that since we were visiting shops in Lunenburg, NS.
We had a wonderful Christmas with family. The 22-pound, half frozen turkey was cooked, juicy, and nicely browned thanks to the convection oven.
Any questions? E-mail me at nsilverstone@telus.net or see me online at www.silverstonephotos.com.
*Norman Silverstone teaches photography through North Island College and Eldercollege in Port Alberni.