Requiem for a Ricoh Caplio R5

A little while ago, I told you how we lost our last camera: the lovely Olympus C750.  This is the eulogy for our Ricoh Caplio R5.  It has been with us but a short time and not all of it happy but it served us well.  I am sorry it is gone; more so because I am its murderess.

The Caplio started its life with us as an almost impulsive buy to replace the much-missed Olympus.  We were new in the UK and had not sent any photos back to our families, as we had none.  A week before our first holiday in the UK, I visited the local camera store and bought it.  They did not have any of the cameras I really wanted.  It was on special; it was compact; it did fantastic macros and it had a powerful optical zoom for such a litle camera. Sold.

It served us very well for a few months.

Damn fine macro photo of a snail, if you ask me. April 2007.

It took pretty fine wide-angles, too: Franscican Monastery at Assissi, Italy, July 2007.

Then on our first overnight hike in the UK, we had a minor accident with the Caplio.  My partner and I had barrelled down a mountainside to try to get to a pub before it most probably stopped serving lunch – some country pubs in the UK are bizarrely strict about dining times. We walked into a pub in a Welsh village at about 3 minutes past 2pm and were greeted with an unfriendly: “We’ve stopped serving.”  Disappointed and not a little discombobulated by the customer service, we went outside to discuss our options.  My partner was holding the Caplio, but also juggling some other things and, in extracting the map so that we could consider our options, he dropped the camera.

Do you ever do that thing where if you have done something you know to be bad, your next moves are then very quick as if by speed you could erase the deed?

With lightning speed I bent down and picked the camera up from the pavement and cradled it in the palm of my hand.  I think I turned it on again to discover that it still turned on.  So I turned it off and we dealt with the more pressing matter of food and the rest of our day’s walk to our intended campsite for the night.

Yskyryd Fawr - shortly before The Unfortunate Lunch & Camera Incident of August 2007.

Our accident with the Caplio resulted in it becoming more temperamental – it still worked, but sometimes it would not turn on at all; or it just would not take a photo; or it saved a photo to its hard-drive rather than the memory card.  Also,  dropping it had allowed dust to get onto the lens and we learned that we would not be able to clean that dust away. So now, there was a blotch on the camera.  The dust, too, would be temperamental: sometimes present and ruining photos, sometimes minimal and able to cleaned away in post processing, and sometimes a photo could be framed to hide the dust spot.  Not ideal photo taking conditions, but still fine and, occassionally, pretty good.

Still taking good photos - straight out of camera shot: Flowering Quince with Snow, Frankfurt, Germany, March 2008.

 

Then we bought the Fuji Finepix s9600, with which we are very happy except that it is heavy and bulky.  Having the Fuji – which had more manual controls than the Caplio – made me learn more about photographing well and I was able to apply that knowledge to the Caplio, to take better photos with it.

We stopped using the Caplio for a while.  Sometimes, I can be particularly dim.  I had an epiphany one day when packing that we could take both cameras on our trips.  This is especially useful when we are cycling as my partner and I cycle at different speeds (guess who’s slower? If you think it’s the shorty-pants, you’d be right.)  Each of us having a camera means that we don’t miss out on taking photos of things like, oh, caterpillars on the side of the road.

My partner was nowhere in sight when I spotted this spunky caterpillar, Pembrokeshire, Wales, July 2009.

Both cameras were with us for our recent trip to France.  For most of our week, the weather was unsettled.  That is, it rained, then the sun came out, then the wind blew, then the rain came in sideways and then the sun came out again.  We’re reasonably phlegmatic about weather – we’ll generally just keep on doing whatever we had intended to do.  As we were staying in a wonderful apartment in Dinan, we spent more days inside, reading, lazing, playing Carcassone then we would normally if the weather had not been so unsettled.

Our last day dawned lovely, with crisp, clear skies.  The night before we had decided to make a long day’s ride from Dinan to St Malo, from where our ferry would take us back to England.  St Malo is about 30kms on a bike (that is, taking smaller roads and not the most direct route) north of Dinan, but we had decided we would make a sort of triangular trip, about 35kms north-east out to Dol de Bretagne and then cutting back another 35 or so kms to St Malo, via Cancale – famous for its oysters.  I was particularly happy that we had blue skies.

The blue skies did not last long.  It drizzled on us as we flew along with a tail wind pushing us effortlessly into Dol de Bretagne.  It cleared when we were near Dol, visiting a standing stone (Menhir du Champ Dolent) and then started to rain again as we headed out towards the coast.  While cycling along the coast, we were buffeted by what felt like galeforce winds but the skies were blue.  At one stage, I was actually blown off my bicycle (luckily onto a nice soft grassy verge.)

It was raining lightly as we rolled into Cancale, thankfully with the wind behind us.  We located a decent looking restaurant with undercover, outside seating so we could keep an eye on our trusty steeds, and then began to peel off layers of waterproofs and fleeces before sitting down to a fantastic meal including, of course, the freshest and most delicious oysters I have ever tasted.

Oysters at Cancale, November 2009.

After lunch, it was still drizzling.  I stood up and started to replace my layers.  Last, I collected my rain jacket from the chair beside me.  My heart sunk when I heard a ka-thunk.  I looked down to see the Caplio in its nifty red Crumpler case looking back up at me reproachfully.  It had not been a drop; rather, I had flicked the Caplio from its resting place on top of my jacket (where I had, foolishly, placed it after taking the above photograph) onto the restaurant’s hard, wooden floor.  I did not retrieve it quickly.  I think I already knew that it could not take any more.  I tried to turn the Caplio on, but failed.

At our next stop, I found I could still turn the Caplio on but its auto-focus was completely gone (it has no manual focus).  It was bucketing down at this stage and the light was poor, so I was still hopeful that all was not lost.  Have I mentioned that I am ever an optimist?  The Caplio has always been rather rubbish in poor light, even before the first accident.

The next day, during a patch of bright, brilliant sunshine, I turned the Caplio on again.  It absolutely refused to focus on anything – near distance, far distance, middle distance; all blurry.  It’s over.  I’m sorry.

We had good times, the Caplio and me.  Together, we have visited more places in the 2 and 3/4 years we’ve been together than I had during my life before the Caplio.  With it, I reassurred my family of my continued existence and, occassionaly, graced them with snaps of my grinning mug.  With it, I have taken my best ever photograph of a dragonfly and learned to understand (and even manipulate) shallow depth of field.  With it, I have been almost comfortable taking snaps of food in restaurants.  With its dust-spot, I thought more about composition and I learned to post-process.  It has, actually, taught me a lot about photography.

Goodnight, Caplio.

*****

I feel like I am a poor custodian of cameras. First, drowning the Olympus; now defenestrating the Caplio.  Goodness knows what villainous deeds await the Fuji.

 

Truffles & Twitter

Truffles & Twitter are now indelibly linked in my mind.

I have been mulling over whether to join Twitter for awhile, even though, quite some time ago, I disparaged it as being like watching a car crash.  (Curiousity for the sake of curiousity, voyeurism, nothing gained.)  I am still ambivalent about Twitter.  There are good and interesting (according to me) Twitterers out there but I’m not sure I’m going to be one of them.

I wondered if Twitter would make me write more often.  Or if, like Facebook, it would just be another distraction, into which my time could disappear for hours and I emerge from the other side having done no more than read a whole lot of updates, taken a lot of quizzes, rummaged through a lot of photos – some of people whose lives I care about and some just from idle curiousity – and made snarky comments on my nieces’ and nephews’ lives.  Inevitably, when I had finished, I would be too exhausted to write anything of my own.

I do like that Facebook allows me to have light-hearted exchanges with friends and families.  I can’t send an email to my niece saying, “Like your life plans, kid.  Good luck.”  Emails need to be a bit more substantial than that.  I would have to demonstrate I recalled our last interaction and what was happening with her life.  I would have to compose a brief but interesting catalogue of what was happening with mine.  Instead, Facebook allows me to feel that I can just hang out, instead of having to craft a more meaningful, quality correspondence.  Hanging out is equally important quality time to relationships.

Currently, I sit in one corner of the living room drafting this post and my partner sits in another playing a computer game with lots of bells and whistles (I’m serious).  It’s a pleasant way to pass the time.  I cannot do this with a lot of people because I’m on the other side of the world and awake, while they are asleep.  But I can look at the photos of their holiday last week and comment with, “Hey, looks like you had a lovely time. X”.  Or take the same quiz.  Or just feel a part of their life by checking out their Facebook profile page, even though I do nothing to let them know I just spent an hour reading through past updates and wall posts.

I’ve stopped playing Scrabble via Facebook, partly because the hoo-ha about it meant that it disappeared from my profile and partly because weeks and weeks would go by and I would not play a move.  It just became another thing I had a vague sense of guilt about, so I let it slide.  I had a real-time, actual, tiles and paper-dictionary game of Scrabble recently and it was lovely.  I lost (my opponent was my partner.  Still have not won.  I’ll get you next time, [partner], next time. <insert somewhat unhinged cackle>)

I am now on Twitter.  The catalyst was Kirsty but no blame laid. You can check out my tweets, if you want.

The timing of joining up to Twitter coincided with me making chocolate truffles for the first time.  Unsurprisingly, I tweeted about truffles.  And now, I’ll post a recipe.  They are so ridiculously easy and great to experiment with, though I only made one type of chocolate truffle.  There will be more.

Chocolate Truffle with Coffee Liqueur

Truffle Recipe, from The Australian Women’s Weekly Cook: How to Cook Absolutely Everything.

What you Need

• Chocolate: blocks of cooking chocolate of any description, white, milk or dark work fine.  Quantity is approximately 200 – 250 gms.
• Cream: I used single cream and about 1/3 cup
• Flavouring: I used two tablespoons of coffee liqueur.  You can also use about that amount of any kind of flavouring that takes your fancy: citrus (rind and juice); ginger (glace or stem ginger in syrup); nuts … oh, the list is endless!  You can even use no flavouring.  Crazy.
• Cocoa powder – dusting your finished product with.  You could also use icing sugar (but why?) or chopped nuts.

• A big heat-proof bowl
• A refridgerator

What to Do

• Break the chocolate into chunks, or if you’re feeling energetic, grate the chocolate into a big bowl.
• Pour cream onto broken up / grated chocolate.
• Set bowl over a saucepan of water and melt cream and chocolate together until you have a smooth paste.
• Let cool a wee bit and then add your flavouring.
• Mix well.
• Put into the fridge and do something else for at least three hours or even, overnight.
• Take out from the fridge and let mixture come to room temperature  (ish.  This does not have to be very precise).
• Place cocoa powder into a bowl and plunge your hands into the powder, covering your palms fully with cocoa powder.  You need nice, cold hands.  You could run your hands under cold tap water and then dry – very well – before doing this.  Or you could, like me, go stand outside holding your hands up and letting the ambient temperature make your hands icy cold.  Not recommended for tropical and temperate climes.
• Using a teaspoon, scoop out some of the chocolate mixture and roll into little balls.
• Roll the balls in cocoa powder (or icing sugar or chopped nuts etc)
• Place on some greaseproof paper.
• Continue rolling mixture into little balls, and rolling balls in cocoa powder (or etc) until all the mixture is used up.
• Stick the cocoa dusted balls into the fridge until you are ready to eat them (but wait at least 15 minutes so they can harden a bit).
• Stare at your chocolate covered hands, but, unless you like the taste of bitter unsweetened cocoa powder, resist the urge to lick them.  Just run your hands under warm water to clean.
• I don’t know how long the truffles will keep.  Recipe book says two days; some online sources say a month.  People will eat them before they go off.  A small child started crying when his mother would not allow him to have another at the barbecue I attended and to which my contribution was the truffles.  Pride contended with guilt over small child’s reaction.  Pride won out.

New Blog!

I have, finally, left my Blogger blog for a new home where I can customise the header picture with a degree of ease.  Halfway between Ca Mau and Sai Gon will sit for posterity’s sake, but I’m much happier with the interface of WordPress.

I hung onto Blogger for so long because I enjoyed Google Analytics.  The information it provided was very interesting.  Most people came to my site looking for bun bo hue or banh canh recipes.   I bet they were disappointed.  Ultimately, however, Google Analytics did not in any way affect my behaviour and I began to look at it less and less.  It really did not matter to me how much traffic I got, or where from, or, indeed, why.  Those of you interested in my writing commented; those of you who were not, went away again.  Hopefully, it was a nice encounter, even if neither of us got much out of it.

This is a bit of a nothing post.  Sorry.

Here is a photo to make up for it:-

View from the train window: snow (yes, it's still exciting) on the fields of north Hampshire, maybe south Berkshire.