Jacquetta

In January, I bought a new camera, the Panasonic Lumix G1. It’s the first digicam to have interchangeable lenses that is NOT a 'single-lens reflex'. Instead, an excellent electronic viewfinder replaces the traditional SLR mirror/prism 'reflex' light path. This makes it smaller and lighter than previous dSLRs, albeit larger than the just-announced Olympus E-P1. (The Oly, like the Panny, is "Micro four-thirds" format and is just about pocketable. Indeed if it had a viewfinder, I'd be gnashing my teeth about having bought the Panny instead of waiting.)

For hiking and taking landscape shots for our guidebooks, size/weight is a major issue. But the smallest digicams tend not to have a viewfinder. In bright daylight, I find an LCD screen almost useless. Back in 2007 while on Xtreme Everest with such a camera, I was reduced to setting it to auto-bracket, pointing, shooting and hoping – only to delete 2 out of 3 shots each evening, in the dark of my tent at Everest Base Camp.

What I love about the G1:
• full creative control of settings and lenses
• sensor switches image from screen to viewfinder when you bring the camera up to your eye
• manual focus does a clever enlarging trick just when you need it
• articulated LCD screen lets you shoot over people’s heads or from low angles
• helpful community of G1 users on the Lumix forum
• 7-14mm wide-angle zoom (WAZ) lens opens up huge new scope, see images below.

So what’s not to like? The price of the recent WAZ lens apart, a spare battery from Panny costs a ridiculous £70 – whereas third-party replacements are about £20 in rip-off Britain, or USD25 for 2 in the US. And for use on trek and at altitude, a spare is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.

Panny has just made matters worse by announcing that its new firmware “upgrade” will detect unofficial batteries and disable the camera! I realise that they’d prefer us to buy batteries from them, and if they’d slash its price I’d be happy to. I can believe their claim that some unofficial batteries lack internal protection and may overheat, but even Panny says only “some”, not “all”. I’ve used third-party batteries with two previous Lumix digicams without any problems. If expecting customers to disable their camera for use with competitive batteries isn’t illegal, it ought to be. This dubious “upgrade” is a scandalous restrictive practice, and the Lumix forum is buzzing with protest.

But still, I love this camera. Let me share a pair of photographs I took on Thursday at the newly refitted Faraday Theatre of the Royal Institution. There was NO natural light source, and hardly any artificial, so these are at 2000ASA, hand-held (after several glasses of wine:) at 1/5th second. The first image is what a "normal" 28mm wide-angle lens would capture, the second (equivalent to 14mm) captures the whole 310-seat raked theatre with front desk.

Buying a new camera is, of course, only the beginning of the spending. You soon find that certain small extras are indispensable. The Lumix G1 uses the faster, newer SDHC memory cards – better than the old SD cards, but almost inevitably they turn out to be incompatible with any card reader that you may have already. Connecting your camera direct to the USB port by cable is far from ideal, with a fiddly access flap and a tiny prong that looks easy to mis-connect. Enter the neat solution: slip the SDHC card into a USB card reader, mine for the princely sum of £3.69 (delivered) from the wonderful 7dayshop:

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(And yes, I have seen this item even cheaper elsewhere, but having found 7dayshop reliable and helpful, I'd rather stick with them than risk disappointment.)

The next challenge was to sort out my tripod, which various time-wasting searches had failed to locate. When a close friend returned it recently after a two-year loan that I had forgotten all about, I was torn between delight that I hadn't, after all, lost it, and frustration that it came back missing the vital quick-release post, the piece that screws into the camera and connects it to the tripod:

Since the friend who had lost it reported failure with his local Jessops only at 5.25pm on Saturday, and I am off early tomorrow on a trip where I might get a front cover photo opportunity, replacing it seemed very urgent indeed. Most photo specialists seem to close at 5pm on a Saturday, so a very fast Google search was needed. It revealed recent exchanges on the website of the East of England Binocular Centre. Even better, the very helpful Chris was still answering his phone, they were in stock and charged just £10 including delivery. Considering that my tripod is 30 years old, and useless without this gizmo, I was only too delighted to pay up. Strangely for a binocular specialist, this seems to be one of their top sellers. Later, I found it also on Amazon, but at £18.95. So I am delighted to have found a small indie specialist doing a great job, and thanks to Google, I found it in time for them to dispatch on Monday and (thanks to the much-maligned Royal Mail) it arrived this morning.

Last Sunday I saw that Monday had a good weather forecast for the north of England, so I headed south to try again to capture the cliffs near Robin Hood's Bay. My previous visit was blighted by sea fog so thick that I couldn't even see the water, so I never got the camera out.

I knew I'd need an early start to hike there, carrying Lumix G1 camera, several lenses and tripod. I woke about 4.15, just before the alarm went off, and crept out quietly from my B&B. Fortunately the weather held, but I had to work fast, with the tide ebbing and the light waxing less magical by the minute.

Obviously I tried various locations and angles, and I've just been reviewing them all for possible use as a book cover. I think my best two efforts, taken within a few minutes and yards of each other, were among the very first. But which will make a better front cover? The first perhaps shows the cliffs better, the second has a strong concave feature (a cove or "hole"). Please comment on which one you'd be more likely to pick up in a bookshop or click if seen online. It would really help me to hear from you. The choice was made vastly more difficult by the first two people I asked each decisively jumping a different way. So I'm hoping that if anybody out there is reading this, they'll say which they prefer and why.

If you want to see why I needed to get up so early, compare these with one taken under 90 minutes later. The combined effects of the falling tide and the very ordinary lighting to me undermine its impact:

On Sunday, my Sandals dives were cancelled because of high winds. However at 11.20 I found out that the Stuart Cove shark-feeding dive would run in the afternoon, leaving at 12 noon. So I scrambled to retrieve dive gear and do the paperwork (two separate liability release forms), then joined the group which had only 7 divers in total, plus a shark feeder (Ingrid) and an underwater videographer (Janine). (I wondered how difficult, in the long-ago days of TV's “What’s my line?” the miming of either of those occupations would have been?)

After a preliminary wreck dive, Ingrid gave us a shark briefing as well as some safety advice. (Dive briefings can sometimes be casual affairs, but on this one, every diver was listening as if his/her life depended on it.) Caribbean reef sharks live for up to 40 years, if lucky enough not to be killed by humans, but aren’t sexually mature until they are about 10-15 years. The death of each mature shark represents the loss also of future shark generations.

National Geographic says that 40 million sharks are killed each year, largely because shark's fin soup is highly valued, especially in China. Finning is a brutal practice in which fisherman cut off the fins and throw back the hapless shark to bleed slowly to death in the ocean. Considering sharks have been around for over 400 million years, it seems shocking that human greed is threatening to make them extinct over a few decades: see Shark Allies.

I had been slightly concerned about the ethics of shark feeding, in case the tourist attraction created a dependency culture. Much to my relief it turns out that the bait supplied by these daily feeds amounts to a light snack that doesn't affect their need to hunt and feed. Sharks are the vultures of the ocean, seeking dead and diseased flesh (carrion) and thus keeping the oceans clean. Jaws movies and general superstition have given them an unfairly bad name.

Live divers are not their preferred food, but they may test if something is edible by biting (which could lead to an accidentally sticky end of your dive if you get in their way). Anyway, these are wild animals and powerful swimmers, and when excited by food their thrashing about creates strong turbulence, so you need to stay alert. If what they bite is unyielding, their teeth are sacrificial: apparently each shark may grow and discard over 20,000 teeth in its lifetime.

I was pleased to see that Ingrid and Janine both put on chain mail protection (there was no cage, just a small bait box). We, the other divers, had only subtle protection: the sharks are supposed to be attracted to the fish bait and the person dishing it out, rather than to us. We were briefed to keep still and follow instructions, at all costs avoiding any thrashing about of arms or legs. Experienced divers try to make minimal movement to conserve air anyway, but we had added incentive on the shark feed. This image shows the lovely Ingrid in her chain mail with excitable sharks milling about her bait; you can just make out some divers kneeling or lying prone in the sand behind her:

Technically, our dive was very simple: we added extra weight to guarantee negative buoyancy and kneeled or lay in a circle watching Ingrid and sharks at the centre. We remained almost motionless for 50 minutes, which sounds a long time but believe me there was not a dull moment. This was, by a long way, the most exciting, engaging and interesting dive I have ever done. Being so close to these acrobatic fish was totally absorbing, rather than frightening, akin to an extreme form of aquatic modern dance.

You can see the dive boat at upper right of this picture, and I am the diver small at lower left. The second image below gives a better sense of how close they came, though the shark image isn't as good:

We were warned that the sharks might knock out our regulator or mask and firmly told not to touch the sharks – but nobody told the sharks not to bump into us. The constant circling, the sharks' extreme closeness and the small group size meant that photography could hardly fail. I even took some decent shots myself, though I freely admit that the images here were all taken by Janine of Stuart Cove. In the one below, I'd just taken out my air regulator to make the photo recognisable, BTW: I don't think I'd have felt as calm if a shark had knocked it out!

In my wildest dreams I never thought that I'd ever get my name in big letters on a billboard, and if I had, I'd have expected it to be for some really daring adventure. Yet outside our local newsagent, here was the billboard for my flying visit to Arctic Norway.

It had been featured on page 2 of the Observer's June 11 issue, complete with five photographs. If you read my previous entry, you'll know how nearly these photos came to oblivion. Yet thanks to PhotoRescue, they were recovered and printed in the Stirling Observer feature.

The weird thing is that I now look back on that temporary loss of images as having been a good thing. Many of the people who have read that entry have told me that they never used to carry a spare card (but will now); or that they didn't know how to change their card (!) but will find out now; or that they had nearly lost photos like that in the past and had no idea what do do (but know now). I've come to the conclusion that my narrow escape may, through blogging, have had the good effect of alerting a few folk to an accident waiting to happen. And if so, that is a blessing.

Anyway, if you fancy a trip to the midnight sun, Widerøe's twice-weekly flights to Bergen direct from Edinburgh start on Saturday 26 June. But take a spare card for your camera, just in case.