Can You Hear Me Screaming?

With all the positive feedback I was getting about the photos I posted Saturday night, I was feeling pretty good about the camera this morning. I tested those settings last night inside, like this photo of Heidi. She has finally decided it is okay to sit in "Sadie's Chair" after almost four months. It's her favorite place to sleep now.

It's funny to see her walk into the living room, stop, look at the couch, then left at the chair ... then turn and jump in the chair. Stella now has more room to stretch out at night on the couch while I read, watching ballgames or a movie.

If I wasn't so busy beating my head against my desk this morning, I'd have time to lean back with my mouth wide open and scream as loud as I could. That was my reaction after downloading the photos from the walk. I took 53 photos and am posting only 16 of them here ... even some of the 16 suck, but I wanted to post them to show you what I am talking about.

I thought Sunday might be a 'day off' from electronics. My Apple Watch is working to perfection. Your feedback on my photos made it seem the settings were correct so the camera was set for taking photos anytime day or night. I did not even have the huge 800Mb of 'data dump' that I experienced Friday and Saturday morning ... where Google Chrome was showing Wordpress .com as the guilty party.

Things were looking good for today ... more NFL playoff games and an IU basketball game at 4:30pm.

I looked at the first photo I downloaded from the camera SDHC card and was SHOCKED!!

ALL OF THEM ... all 53 of them were too dark, except for the two I took in "Auto" instead of "M". Not only were they dark but almost all of them were out of focus. I mean I was in total shock as I moved through the photos, enlarged on my 27" 4K monitor. I won't tell you which ones but I had to lighten some of them just to see Stella.

Here is an example ... I did no editing to this photo. It was much brighter than this outside.

Another example of being too dark ... you can barely see Stella in the lower right corner walking along the edge of the woods. BUT IT DOESN'T STOP THERE ... it even gets more interesting. I think "Flabbergasted" would be the correct word to describe my thought process at this point of the walk.

As I zoomed into maximum, which would have put nothing but Stella into the photo, just like yesterday afternoon ... the bar was showing the zoom was max'd out and I wasn't even close to a 200mm zoom. For some reason I couldn't get to full zoom. The camera was working okay but the scale on the monitor was showing me the zoom was as far as it would go.

Mostly for the zoom feature, I quickly changed from "M" to "Auto" ... it still would not zoom in any further but it did lighten up the photo without any editing. This is pretty close to what the morning was looking like in color and lightness.

I was probably no further away from Stella than what this photo shows, and "Auto" is still on. Slightly out of focus.

As an example .. from this photo forward I was shooting back in the "M" mode. Stella is blurred, the twigs closest to me were sharp and clear. I think I know where I can fix that by changing two settings.

I was SHOCKED the way this photo came out. In the monitor on back of the camera, everything looked sharp and clear, in focus ... Stella and the surrounding area. The beep told me I was in focus. DISAPPOINTING would be an understatement. That is the worst photo I have ever taken of the area in front of us.

Again that stem right in front of me is sharp ... where I was wanting the tractor in focus. I have a setting to "track" instead of "1-photo" I might have to change back to the default. I thought the "tracking" option would be good for catching Stella and/or deer running, in stop action.

This photo was not edited and looks like I would expect ... why is this one good and not the others???? I looked over into the field in the direction that Stella was looking ... I saw no deer, nothing in the field that would make her so interested.

In my eyes ... this is not sharp, too dark on her face and to the left of her head.

I took five photos to show the damage the yard moles are doing to the yard in this warm weather. This photo is the only one that was clear enough to see what was going on. All taken with me standing in the same spot, just turning left and right for different yard damage.

I am not happy about this photo either. Too dark, looks nothing like it did in real time. Plus the photo is a tad out of focus. I even put my glasses on to double check before I wrote that sentence.

This morning I took three photos of Heidi, two with the Canon and one with the iPhone 8+ ... the auto flash did not fire on the Canon and for some reason the setting in the "flash fire" is greyed out where I cannot change it under the current settings. It was the same when I moved to Auto from Manual.

I'll be digging into the owners manual right after I publish this post.

I am seriously considering 'resetting' the camera back to the factory defaults and THEN going back to change the settings that I remember doing yesterday. THEN I'll go outside to take some test photos ... of course the lighting will be better an hour or two later than these morning photos.

If I am going to use the Canon G9 X on the morning walks ... I am going to have to figure out quickly what in the hell is going on inside that camera. I obviously have messed up something playing around with it last night .... USER ERROR!!!

I forgot to tell you, even with the strap around my wrist, I dropped this camera in the field. About the time I was changing the setting from manual to auto, I remembered I had not set my watch to track my time and distance for the walk, which I do all the time. I had to slide my glove off, so my fingertip could tap the watch screen to activate the activity.

When pulling off my glove, the camera strap came with it ... dropping down onto the soft grass, no harm done as it was a very soft landing.

SO FAR ... with time to adjust the Canon ... the iPhone 8+ is the better camera for indoors low light conditions ... such as, at night with one lamp turned on by the couch.

It is still a great day though ... the sun is already bright at 9:22am ... this post is not soaking up data like a sponge and there will be ballgames on tv again today. There is plenty of food, the hounds are rested and I am rested ... so it's all good. I just thought I'd be spending less time with my head inside an owners manual or in front of a computer monitor.

Above average temps for January here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Still Making Camera Adjustments

Obviously I am still learning about the new Canon G9X I bought. With a friend's help I made some adjustments to the camera settings with exposure, sharpness, contrast and other small changes to the settings. Some of these look pretty good, others need a lot of help. I did not edit any of these photos taken around 2pm with Stella's walk. Even Heidi spent time in the yard while Stella and I took off in the field.

I'll look back through my notes, bookmarked camera pages and the owners manual of course. Now the Apple Watch is running smoothly. All apps are working perfectly and I finally have the watch face giving me only the information I want at a glance.

One NFL game is finished with the right team winning, one more to start in a few minutes. With an early wakeup time this morning I may not make it to the end of this next game.

Any feedback on these few photos is welcomed, speak freely either by making a comment or sending me an email. They will eventually improve and look much better. It is amazing how many features that small camera has.

Saturday At 4:53am

I've done it again. Only this time it's not in the middle of the week but a Saturday???? It's never a good thing to wake and not able to get back to sleep when you didn't go to bed early to begin with. Evidently I had too much on my mind when I went to bed after a Friday filled with Stella's separation anxiety, a new watch, a new camera, rain, and the normal million thoughts being processed by my peabrain.

Before I go any further I just noticed on my Activity Monitor that tracks all hard drive activity, just like that almost 800Mb of data was used. I went into the Google Data Saver which will tell me in order what websites are using  up the data. For the second day in a row WORDPRESS .COM is the guilty party!!!!

What?????

It used over a Gb of data yesterday, which is abnormal. I can't afford to let it use that much data so off to the forums I will be this morning. As a test I closed Google Chrome just in case Chrome and Wordpress are not working well together. I opened Firefox, all the same websites I closed on Chrome. I added only TWO images to my Wordpress media library ... TWO PHOTOS ... then watching the data counter go to 119Mb !!!!

Luckily with the Wordpress Premium plan that I had to buy so I could use my own domain name, which blocked all of the automatic advertisements, has a pretty fast email response team on the weekends, so I'll get an answer to this problem pretty quickly.

It was a 'big' morning this morning. There were some "firsts" going to happen which would result in answering some questions I had lingering after the two purchases yesterday PLUS how Stella would be feeling today after all the fruit she ingested yesterday.

One of the differences was using the Apple Watch's activity feature on my walk. The Garmin Sport was easy but lately did not lock into the GPS so I had to use their alternative "indoor walk", which kept time acccurately but decided the walk distance was .22 of a mile. This morning it was a single tap to start the clock and a single tap to end the walk. Instantly I had more information in front of me than ever before. It was detailed to the point of telling me I had climbed 32' during the walk.

Not only using a smaller camera than the Nikon D3200 today, but how well would that work with me wearing these gloves in temperatures a little over 32°? I had tested these gloves on an old Nikon CoolPix 3100, which is smaller than the new Canon G9. The gloves worked okay when I tested them. I did that test before I made the Canon purchase online.

Since we were up to start the day at 4:53am, I knew that Stella would be pretty anxious to get outside and start the walk. She was but she was about two hours too early for that. It was also dark outside so she was going to have to wait until the normal time of 8am. We actually started five minutes early. As soon as the door was open she went running for the field. That fruit was about to clean out her digestive system.

I have just the basic settings in the camera tuned in. I wasn't sure how the photos would turn out, so you can see for yourself. A lot of the photos I did not have to edit at all, some others I added a little color but overall very little editing on any of these early morning photos. I have no doubt there are some settings I can change to fine tune the camera for our next walk, thus improving some things in the photos.

After I downloaded them into the computer, my first impression was "these photos looked real" ... I mean, the grass color, the trees, etc looked exactly as they are. Yes, they are drab but it's winter in the Midwest. I could tell a slight difference in these photos compared to the ones I'd take the same time of day with the Nikon D3200

A lot of early morning air traffic this morning. What is interesting they are coming from the south, so I am guessing the Louisville airport would be the starting point. I live half way between Louisville KY and Indianapolis IN, almost to the exact mile between them.

Stella seemed more interested in tracking scent this morning rather than eating deer scat. That is always a good thing and it means I can do less 'verbal herding.'

Evidently I wasn't walking fast enough for her.

As she trotted through the field and I walked through the field ... frozen grass and leaves would crunch loud enough for me to hear. Yet the path was very soft and in some spots muddy. In the one spot I fell in up to my ankles last week, there was standing water where my boot print was today

She stayed on the path for most of the way. Don't ask me why? I don't have any answers at all about how she operates. She is definitely in her own little world

This was a test to see how clear/sharp that AT&T tower would be from a distance. I thought I'd back off the zoom a little so I could catch that airliner in the picture. I found the much smaller camera very easy to operate.

She was on her own for most of the walk, after we made that first turn.

Heading southwest ... St. Louis? Kansas City? or further south?

No photos to prove it since I doubt you would be interested, but let's just say that Stella made a few more stops along the walk than she usually does, to get all of those apples and bananas out of her system.  :)

Can you tell which photos I edited?

From the way Stella ended her walk, it looks like the field cat paid us a visit last night while we slept.

I won't discuss too much about the Apple Watch because I want to share all the pros and cons I have found after I have used it for a while, probably a couple of weeks from now. So far after only a few hours of using it and getting it set up so I know where the information is and how it operates ... I'll say it's been a very good purchase.

There are many things I like about it. I did my first ECG or EKG yesterday. It let me know that my heartbeat was normal, nothing to be alarmed about. Since I did not buy the cellular model, all the setting up and adding apps when needed is done from the iPhone.

With a sunny day ahead, it will be a good day to try the Canon G9 on the walk in the afternoon so I can get a better comparison. Today is NFL Playoff Saturday plus college basketball so I am not sure how much I'll get outside, still Stella will get her afternoon walk, as she always gets during the ballgames.

I dreamed about deadbolt locks last night. It was the last thing I thought about right before turning off the lights for the night. They were suggested to me last month when I wrote about Stella's escape. I transferred those posts to this blog on December 9th.

As funny as it might seem, I am beginning to think her escape was caused by her desire for food. Normally she would have been fed between 11am-12noon ... I didn't walk in the door until 12:53pm??? That was a hour or two late. I saw no signs that she tried to open the locked kitchen door to get out of the house.

The ONLY thing I saw she got into was the fruit she ate, from two different bowls in two different locations. She did not even touch her favorite chew toy, the hard plastic clothes basket. I had put that in the bathroom so she wouldn't chew it up in the bedroom, while I was gone.

It's going to be a good day today in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.