After dark...

 A couple of weeks since I got it, and I am still utterly blown away with the quality of the camera on the new phone - especially it’s night time capability. The shot above was taken last night as we walked to do our shopping. The super-bright moon was shedding so much light I was interested to see how the camera would cope with the combination of that and the surrounding streetlights - as you can see the answer was “astonishingly well!” Most impressive to me was that it even managed to capture some of the brighter stars - and this handheld, with no tripod. It uses a form of long exposure, combined with extremely sophisticated image stabilisation and noise reduction systems, and delivers quite incredible results. 

It’s no slouch at close ups either - even on a challenging subject like these white flowers seen in the museum walled garden at the weekend, where it could so easily have lost the highlights or given the whole  thing a grey-ish cast. I said in a previous post that some of the justification for spending the money I did on the phone rather than the less expensive lower-spec version was that it also these days replaced a compact camera for me, and the results I’m getting from it certainly bear that out. Money well spent! 

In other news, England now moves out of our second lockdown and back into a Tier system - although with stronger restrictions than the previous tiers. Aside from a few tiny areas, almost the entire country falls into either Tier 2 or 3 - we are back into 2 here, although since fear we’ll be headed for Tier 3 before too long as our numbers here are rising at a frightening rate. It feels locally as though a lot of people were SO upset by Essex’s decision to force a move to a tier 2 back in October that it just became the last straw for them and they gave up following the guidelines entirely as a knee-jerk reaction.  Not the right thing to do, but allowing that when the earlier tier 2 decision was taken, we were among the lowest case numbers in the country I can understand the frustration. We can only now hope that in fact lockdown was observed rather better than it seemed to be, and that we start seeing the numbers heading the right way sooner rather than later. For us personally there will be little difference from the lockdown to Tier 2 - the rugby club has decided that edge to the restrictions being imposed, it can’t afford to re-open the bar, and very few of our local pubs serve meals so they won’t be re-opening either.

Personally I found the second lockdown far easier to cope with than the first - partly because we’ve done it all before, partly because of the time of year - with shorter days and colder temperatures it feels less of a bind to be asked to stay at home, and partly because there were less restrictions this time round on, for example, going outside for exercise. I’m still struggling with the lack of routine that being furloughed gives - although I’m trying to bring a bit more structure back to my days now as a conscious effort to tackle that. It’s still, with the best will in the world, tough to fill 7 hours of the day though. Running three times a week and some extra walks are at least netting me some extra daylight - and that is much needed with the scaffolding meaning that once inside, the lights are on pretty much all day! 

Robyn