Photography with Rhiannon

I seem to have spent an excessive amount of time on line and on the phone through the weekend and since dealing with urgent business concerns. Not quite what I hoped for with Rhiannon spending the week with us, just something to be coped with, by getting up early and working late. Monday she went shopping with Grandma and did some baking. Tuesday we went on an expedition to Dyffryn Gardens, and I gave her a camera to use. The weather was very kind and congenial for picture taking. I was much taken by her skill and enthusiasm for taking pictures with our little Sony Cybershot W690 point 'n shoot with telephoto lens. 

In fact, she took over two hundred pictures of which no more than half a dozen were out of focus (as the battery was nearly empty and its motor functions slowed up). Most of the pictures she took were well framed and without motion blur, with some interesting close up selections. Quite something for a nine year old. I was quite thrilled to think that I have an accomplice who finds pleasure in capturing visual beauty and interest the way I do. Oh yes, all our family have cameras and take pictures as a matter of course, but what I saw yesterday was the hunter's glint in her eye as we wandered the gardens together.

Today, I showed her how to upload pictures to the Picasa website from her own Gmail account. It'll take a while for her to learn to use properly, and learn photo editing, but there's nothing like an early start. I had difficulty accessing Google+. It required date of birth and gender, if not a photo for her profile, information I had no right to give or encourage her to impart. She's old enough to use her account responsibly, but has no need to disclose any information that might make her vulnerable on-line. She's not too young to hold and use an account, which is, in any case, supervised by her parents, but why should such personal details be of any interest to anyone? Or the personal details of anyone supervising her? I used to take no interest in the issue of personal data acquisition by Google and others, but suddenly it's become personal.

Anyway we got her pictures up on the web and looked at them on the Asus Transformer when Uncle Owain came around for supper happily home from a great weekend of gigging in Berlin. I wouldn't be surprised if he moved out there before too long.