They NEVER sit still

Today was interesting to say the least! I was photographing the children in the local playschool . Just before I left for the school as I did my final gear check my camera packed in!! ie the autofocus stopped working. Now of course I do have a second camera for just such occasions but my daughter has it in Dublin. So I decided its Ok I can manually focus and everything else appeared to be working fine. I had forgotten that about 18months ago I had broken my Nikor 80-200, 2.8 lens. What happened was that on an occasion as I excitedly ran across some rocks to get a picture I fell and the lens (and Camera) had helped break my fall, anyway as a result the lens has been unable to manually focus ever since but the autofocus worked fine, so never wanting to be without my equipment I did not send it away for repair . I did not even think about this until in the playschool with the first child in front of me I went to focus the lens! So I had a camera that would not auto focus and a lens that would not manually focus!!! I got over this by using a shorter lens but I can tell you its not easy to manually focus on three year old children even when they are sitting still, thats because they NEVER actually sit still!

Once the job was finished I then had to decide what to do about the camera should I send it away today or wait until after the weekend, I don't need auto focus for Landscapes and the forecast for the weekend is good and given all the bad weather we have had I was looking forward to getting out with the camera. I decided that I should send the camera away today, so it was posted this evening from kiltimagh. As I came out of the post office the sun came out and I regretted sending it. Then I thought I am always telling people who come to me for lessons with compact cameras that if you use then correctly you can get good pictures from them and the size of the camera does not matter. So I came home and hunted for my 6 year old compact camera and went to find a picture. So here it is...