Testing the camera

One person will be surprised to see himself as today's blip - thank you P for being such a good subject.

It was a wild, windy, muddy day for our walk. A lot of regulars were away for the holiday, so only 16 of us set out for our walk from Greenhead to Haltwhistle, via Walltown and Cawfields Quarry. We had 2 extra US visitors today and they were keen to see Hadrian's Wall. At times we could hardly keep our feet due to the wind.

I opted for the Ricoh CX1 as the camera for today. It was good not to have the weight of the Canon 7D, because the wind made walking much harder work than usual. I took this image at the coffee stop at Walltown Quarry. We were able to shelter under the roof there.

The Ricoh manages very well for a compact: I think this image demonstrates one of its strengths which is producing excellent quality portraits without flash. This was taken at ISO 4oo, f4.6 at 1/30 on the automatic setting. I've converted to mono in Photoshop and used a touch of dodging and burning on the eyes.