Cybershot

There are tonnes of pictures and records from other years, just not for 2010. I think they must be everyones favourite and you never get sick of finding them.
Good that you had a successful trip to Minley, I look forward to reading and seeing your piccies when you have sorted them.
I am hoping we might be able to get the Veluwe at the weekend before the football season starts and weekends will be tied up for months until the winter break - Andrew plays for a veterans team. If the weather is OK and we can go it will be great, other wise I will get him to take me somewhere more local, Elswout first thing in the morning so we can get back in time.

Still a little irked by you early fly agaric find , and being confined to home for the last few days because of attrocious weather, I decided to check out where they have been found in my neck of the woods. Well I have checked and they haven't! They could well be here in abundance somewhere but just not recorded on Waarnemings or photgraphed for Nederpix! So for now, I shall feel a little easier thinking that there are none in The Netherlands, let alone in our province of North Holland

We resulted to getting a new computer after the graphics card being replaced twice in a week because of damage caused by over heating then when it was all going again after being reinstalled for the 3rd time the motherboard went. We got the new comp Friday but things didn't go as smoothly as they should but we seem to be up and running again - touch wood!
The camera is still hit and miss - but I think it is me rather than the camera. The most annoying thing is, mistakes I was making the first day of not being able to check on the computer were continued to be made 10 days later without even trying to correct them.
I resulted in taking photos on what I thought they should be taken on and doing them again on Auto just incase which was quite a wise move in the end!

I hope it wont be too long before we get a new computer, Andrew has spent the weekend deliberating over what we should get, I hope he hurries up It is driving me crazy not knowing if my piccies are any good,they often look ok on the camera but when I see them on the comp not at all what I was expecting.

I got a new fungi book when we were at the Veluwe the other day, it is meant to be a field guide but at 700 pages is quite weighty to carry around and honestly it is too nice to get mucky in the field. It has great photo's, short but adequate text and even diagrams for microscope work. It is a Dutch book by Ewald Gerhart, I hope the latin names are the same as the rest of the world but there are species in which aren't found in Britain but here.

I had to google geocaching -I didn;t know what you were on about .

Ok, I shall see what I can sort out. This does so much more than my last and there is so much I haven't even tried out yet. like incamera cropping and multiple shots in fast succession. I took it to the beach one evening last week and only got a few decent piccies of about 80 I took - the lighting was all wrong even though i had it on beach setting -probably because it was evening and not full sunshine but i didn't think about that at the time.
It will all fall into place eventually -I knew my old one so well i could change settings without looking what i was doing so i could keep an eye on insects and not risk losing their where abouts.

I probably wouldn't have noticed the shadow or seen it as being a problem.
I know where the +/- button is - phew!
My manual came on a CD which is a pain, if it was in book form I would keep it in my bag and flip through it as and when, I suppose i should print off the significant bits.

cor- that sounds complicated . I don't know if my camera has that or not. I am so used to doing everything on automatic and letting the camera sort it all out then changing it to night mode for the moths. i even have to remember to take of the lens cap and lift up the flash on this one - my old camers spoiled me!

Hi David, love the piccie of your yellow birds nest.
I am getting to grips a new camera at the mo'. I got a Canon powershot sx20 2 weeks ago and I am still not comfortable with it. I finally worked out the macro and how to get my insect piccies, it took me longer to work out the night mode for my moths which is still hit and miss. All my practice had been in bright sunshine and when I actually went to the Amsterdamse Bos Weds' I had no idea how to use it in the darker conditions of the woods then there was the problem of trying to keep it dry. Even yesterday I binned more piccies than I kept - it is so annoying when things look good on the camera but when they go on the comp they aren't what you hoped. Photographing fungi is difficult at the best of times because of the lighting at least they stay still and don't fly off!
Hope the rain you had encouraged some nice finds for you to make up for the lack of dragonflies.

Have you found any fungi lately? I saw a couple of large Handkea Sp, today but that was it. Seeing blacks waxcaps turned my mind to fungi again.

I went out this morning, been looking forward to it all week and planned my route to take in several places I haven't visited for a while. Turned up a good dragonfly/butterfly area and one of the ponds had totally dried up since I was last there and another was just a muddy bog with a large puddle in the middle . Then I went to a fungi favourite on the off chance thigs had started to appear - they hadn't because my place wasn't there in a form that I know it!
There wan't much around at all, so a very frustrating morning a complete waste of time.