You are not supposed to point your camera towards the sun. Apparently.

Having got up fairly early (for a Sunday), got the dinner ready and bubbling away, and mowed both front and back lawns I decided to go and take my cameras for a walk.

For a change I went to the Leechpool and Owlbeech woods.

The place is supposed to have lots of nature, and sure enough that is what I found.There were two objectives: take photos of something other than Rojo with the new compact camera, and use the telephoto lens on the big camera to get some pictures of squirrels, unless anything more interesting and obscure turned up.

I was a little disappointed with the compact actually.  I left it on full auto mode and found the picture to be quite over-exposed in parts and always picking the wrong thing to auto-focus on.  Part of the problem is that I am a bit old-fashioned and like to look through am opticl viewfinder instead of the LCD on the back of the camera: I just think it is more stable to keep the camera close rather than taking pictures at arm’s length.  With this camera there is no focusing information in the optical viewfinder – to know what it is focusing on you have to look on the LCD.

Maybe I will have to change my habits a bit.  The camera does have image stabilising on it, so maybe holding it away from me will not be so bad after all.

Not much more luck on the squirrel-hunting front.  The buggers do move awfully fast.

The DSLR with squirrel-hunting lens fitted. Not fully-extended.

Best shot I managed. Doesn't look too impressive, but it *was* a very long way away!