Sometimes you take 20+ minutes to take a picture...

I have always seemed fascinated with fire. Not to a dangerous level, I am also not a very dangerous guy. But it does amaze me. We had to get a lighter because the pilot light went out on the stove, and now we need it to turn on the "mechas" haha. So I got the idea to take a picture of the lighter in a dark room. And the "set-up" and getting it how I pictured it took me about 20 minutes...I will try not to bore you with it, but I could not hold the camera and the lighter at the same time. So I set the camera on top of a couple of books, set the timer to take the picture, used manual focus to find the closes I could get to the lighter and still be in focus(cameras, like our eyes, have a minimum focusing distance, any closer and the image will be out of focus). I used a cereal box to get the distance, the replaced it with my hand and the lighter to take the shot. After some trials and different exposure settings, this was the result:

Manual exposure, 1/25sec, ISO 800, f/5.6, the kit lens at 55mm, manual focus

I really enjoyed it. I kept wishing I could get closer to the lighter, so I can't wait to get our macro lens! Macro lenses are for getting really close to your subject(not the same as being able to zoom a lot), most macro lenses are primes, so you can't even zoom on them, but you can get really close and they "magnify" the image.

I promised Sophie some hash browns last night, for breakfast this morning, but we were out of potatoes, so I had to run for some potatoes in the morning(literally). This is a shot of one of the streets on the way to the produce market:

And Colchester has had some really gorgeous skies lately...very photogenic clouds:

Deep blue sky, although partly due to the polarizing filter :) more on that in another post!