I'll Fly Away / Daisy and Shadow

When my mother and dad went to Heaven, hand in hand, in September 2023, among many other things that I am still trying to find room for, I inherited my mother's camera, a Canon PowerShot SX530 HS. It is quite a bit smaller than the cameras I've been using for a while, weighing in at under a pound. Its zoom is 50X. I am a big fan of the Canon PowerShot series, and I have owned a half-dozen of them by now: the PowerShot 120, the 40, the 50, and the 60.

My current squeeze is the HS60 HS, with an awesome 65X zoom. It's a bit on the heavy side, weighing in at a pound and a half. I own three of those, but only two of them still work. The last one I bought, in August 2022, is starting to show serious wear. It sometimes does not show me the image on the back of the camera when I tilt it to take a photo in portrait mode. It's also a bit slow on the shutter when I push it. Press, hold, and wait; there is no quick snap-and-go.

My husband suggested yesterday - with rain in the forecast - that I consider taking my mother's smaller, more portable camera to the fair this coming week. The Grange Fair is a fun event, good times with an old friend and her family. It is also one of my best photo ops of the year. That is pretty serious business, as a photographer.

So I gave his suggestion some consideration. I also got my mom's camera out of the box, fully charged all three (tiny!) batteries, fixed the neck strap, and downloaded and flipped through the manual. It does not have the adjustable swing-out selfie screen on the back that my camera has. Other than that, it is very similar to my own, in what kinds of things it can do and how it is all set up. When I went out for my bike ride up Tow Hill, Mother's camera came along.

Here are two shots I took with it. First is the monarch getting ready to fly away, perched on a spent thistle bloom. This is a shot where I was across the road and I spotted the butterfly. I pursued it and snapped this shot from some distance. Actually, I took 8 shots. About 6 of them were pretty clear. This one gave me the best view of some hot proboscis action. Good deal.

The second shot, in the extras, is a macro of a daisy and its shadow. I had mixed success with the up-close flower shots with this camera. A fair number of them ended up blurry. I took a photo of a different daisy that I later noticed had a bug on it. Was it one of my beloved, adorable, tiny, crab spiders? We'll never know; it was too blurry to tell. 

I changed the battery in the camera and I pulled out the memory card to upload my photos at home. Both the battery and the memory card go into the same big slot together. When you pull one out, the other one wants to come along out, too.

The little latch that holds the battery in does not seem too sturdy; the battery wants to come out unless I push it back in gently a few times. I have no idea how my mother, with her poor gnarled, arthritic hands, ever managed to change either the battery or the memory card successfully.

But it's a nice little camera, and it's very light and small, and it is responsive and quick on the trigger, and I got some good shots. I did have to go home and look up where the "super vivid" extra saturation setting is, as I like to use that once in a while. It does have it,  but it's in a slightly different place than I'm used to looking. Now that I know, no problemo.

I have not made up my mind yet as to which camera will be going along to the fair with me. I'll make that choice Wednesday morning when I see the weather forecast for the day. Until then, I just wanted to document my experiences using my mother's camera. Bonus photo of the ORIGINAL GirlWithACamera here.  ;-)

I've got two photos so here are two songs. For my butterfly getting ready to fly, I've got Rising Appalachia, with I'll Fly Away. For the second shot of the daisy and its shadow self, I've got Lou Gramm, with Lost in the Shadows, from the Lost Boys film.

More camera stuff:
Shutterbugs! (Pentax), November 2013
Seeing Double!? December 2013
Seeing Triple? ;-) December 2016