Bingo!
I mean not a bingo hall, you get what I mean I think.
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You’re sure this isn’t just a figment of your imagination?
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The amount of vape shops seems to be ever growing too
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When I was in east London it was mobile phone shops (especially the “call your relatives in Africa” phone cards); similarly to vape ships there’s no special kit needed, you can turn up with a transit full of stock and be ready to go in half a day from a cold start.
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First of several, maybe:
I almost missed it. I hadn’t looked out there all morning, but suddenly spotted it and hurried out to get some photos. 5 minutes later I glanced out again and it was gone…
Edit: It seems that it flew inside and spent the rest of the day sitting at the bottom of a window, bathed in sunshine (and contending with significantly less wind :). I only saw it when I went to close the curtains for the night. I’m glad the cats didn’t notice it before I did! (Or, if they did, thankful that they left it in peace.)
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I love the gold-coloured bits (which are there from the outset), and this morning I can see the butterfly inside. This one is taped to the beam because it had made its chrysalis on the underside of a leaf, and another caterpillar then ate the leaf! (I’m hoping it’ll be ok, as it had quite a fall from that at the time.)
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Noticed this one a bit earlier – haven’t seen one emerging yet, but it hadn’t finished unfolding itself…
Edit: Lovely! I went out there to see if it was still around, and I couldn’t spot it at first, but all of a sudden it was fluttering right in front of my face! It did about three loops of my head while I watched in delight, and then it flew away. I expect I’d merely disturbed it, but it felt a bit like a farewell visit and a “thanks for hanging me back up after I’d fallen down” :).
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What camera are you taking these picture with?
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It’s ‘just’ a mobile phone camera. Samsung Galaxy S8. I was able to stabilise it against the wooden beam for the better photos.
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Mobile cameras have come so far. I had to ask. (I take most pics with my phone these days. I specifically bought mine for the camera)
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I think I am psychically incapable of photographing sights I see in real life. I mean, yes, I can see the practical utility of having photos of exactly the relevant building in Kensington, Belgravia, Chelsea or Notting Hill, but it’s too deeply ingrained in me to blaspheme at the smartphone and its barely sentient parasite, for me to ever get comfortable with photography of something I already experience.
Plus, I’m never getting a smartphone with a touchscreen. Buttons and at least two weeks of battery power.
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Perhaps you could get a camera?
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But it wouldn’t fit in a pocket. I am way too lazy to carry container, tote bags or even something dangling from a string around my neck.
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A handy side effect of the existence of smartphones is that the vendors of pocket cameras have had to up their game to compete. I’ve had very good results from a Canon PowerShot A1300 which was small enough to fit in my pocket and be “the camera I have with me”.
That was a fair few years ago and there are probably better ones now.
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The pocket camera market is pretty much dead. There are some very nice cameras available, but they’re shockingly expensive. There are some inexpensive cameras, but they’re not very good. Your powershot is representive of the peak pocket camera era. Sensors were good enough, lenses small enough, etc so it was possible to make a pocket camera that was more attractive than a cell phone camera, at a price that made it attractive, and with high enough sales volume to make it a sensible thing to make. That’s not really true any more.
the iphone 4 was the current iphone when that camera was introduced, I think. It’s much lower resolution, single lens, fixed focus, fixed focal length. (I forget if it had a flash, or not. If it did, it was the first model with one.) I have lots of photos taken with one. They’re all crap quality. The contemporary photos I took with pocket cameras (either a slightly older powershot, or a Olympus something or other that was newer) are much much better. (I can tell which photos I took with one of my early iphones, looking at 80x80 pixel thumnails, they’re so bad.)
But the current crop of smartphohes have superior cameras, with pretty good optics and vastly superior low light performance. Even cheap phones have pretty good cameras, and have had for years now. And of course it’s easier to share photos on a device that’s always connected ot a network. So who’s going to spend a couple hundred (bucks, euros, quid) on a pocket camera, when they’re already carrying a good enough camera? The market for the cameras is largely for kids and serious photographers. The kids market means ‘cheap’ and serious photographers spend money on stuff. So the useful middle is gone.
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Coaxial flash is the root of all evil.
But thanks for the update.
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There are still plenty of compact cameras around, and some of them are very good.
There are also plenty of good reasons to have a camera that isn’t a phone!
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What we need is a compact camera that can also send texts and post to TikTok.
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And vice versa. Phone shops in Cheltenham (home of GCHQ) are used to people coming in and saying “no, I need one that doesn’t have a camera”.
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