Morning dew

Taken with Samsung NV3 (automatic) 1/125 f/3.5 ISO 80

This morning when walking the dogs I took along my little Samsung camera (as usual!) and as always managed to find something of interest. Its funny how the same things can look so different in different light. The grass has not been cut for a long time and has beautiful arching heads. The dew in the dark looked almost like frost but I can assure you it was not cold. We were dressed in thin t'shirts even though the two dogs had their best fur coats on!
The trouble with fur coats is that they are a magnet to seed heads! At the moment those seeds called "cobbler's pegs" - thin long black seeds with orange hooks at one end - are out in their thousands. Byron in particular seems to find them and comes home bristling with them!
We were in the park before seven in the morning so the sun was still low in the sky and had not dried up the evening dew. Colin spotted it first - the big spiderweb, slung between twigs and blades of grass. This time I had a spiderweb with a dark background. Most times I see them when I can only get the sky as the background.

Taken with Samsung NV3 (automatic) 1/60 f/4 ISO 120

Shooting a spider web with a point and shoot camera is a hit and miss affair - the cameras are fully automatic so the user cannot control the aperture which in turn controls the depth of field. The focus is totally manual too so if the web is a little hard to see with the naked eye it is even more difficult to see in the 2.5" screen so it makes locating the web very frustrating. It makes focus even more miss than hit. A second spiderweb I tried to capture is a failure - the camera focused on the trees behind and the web is completely "soft" and so makes the picture look like a waste of time!
How I wished I had the SLR with me for these shots. Why? The Aperture can be set with a low number (wide aperture) and this reduces the area in focus. As long as the web is in focus, everything behind or in front would be out of focus and so give even more definition to the beads of moisture on the web. See how in my photo the tree behind the web is so sharp you can almost count the leaves? With shallow focus the web would be just as sharp but the background would be a blur of colour - but still distinguishable as trees and shrubs.

There is a setting on our point and shoot cameras that might do the trick and I must try this some other time - Portrait setting, which is among the collection of options in the "Scene Mode", is intended to isolate a person from their background - maybe that will work.

I have just found the EXIF data for the photos and I am very surprised to note that both these pictures DID have the aperture set low and yet the depth of field is extremely wide. Confused? Me too!
AJ