… is quite symbolic.

It’s one of the first that I have taken with the new Nikon D500 camera.

It’s one of the Joly France, one of the ferries from the Ile de Chausey, heading off to the island with another load of visitors, passing one of the local trawlers heading into the harbour with the day’s catch.

So there I have been over the last couple of days crowing about how despite how late I might (or might not) have been to bed and how disturbed the night was, I had still managed to rouse myself from Ye Olde Stinkinge Pitte at something like a reasonable hour.

And so here I was this morning, in bed early, sleeping all the way through the night in comparative comfort without having to prop up my leg on a box, and sleeping right the way through all of the alarms until about 09:30.

What a way to start the day!

So with having set out all horribly late, I eventually sat down and started to edit the photos that I didn’t do yesterday, and added them into yesterday’s blog entry.

This afternoon I had a read of the camera manual and then went out for a little walk to see how it all would turn out.

And I have quite a lot to learn about this machine – not the least of which being the fact that the controls work backwards from any other Nikon that I have had.

You can probably gather that from some of these iaages

Setting up the camera is quite complicated because being an up-market camera, it’s more of a machine than a camera.

It has buttons and controls everywhere for all kinds of different things, and that’s an advance on the earlier Nikons where you had to program “function” buttons to carry out some of the tasks.

And the manual exposure is so much easier too.

With the older cameras, you needed to set the aperture or the speed by using the “Aperture” or Speed” function, set the camera to Manual, and then adjust the function that you didn’t previously set.

With the Nikon D500 it has separate buttons for “Aperture” and Speed”, and also a separate button for the ISO settings.

So from that point of view it’s much more straightforward.

But as you admire St Helier and the Channel Islands, I’ll mention the problem that I noticed with the controls.

And that is that the “Aperture” and Speed” dials work back-to-front. To widen the aperture on the older cameras you rotate the button clockwise.

But with this one, you have to rotate the button anti-clockwise.

And that caught me out well and truly with the first couple of photos.

Trying to add a little extra light to my images, I ended up adding a little extra dark instead. And that was rather depressing.

I shall just have to work a lot harder in this respect, won’t I?

The camera is also quite heavy compared to the others that I have used.

And so I’m glad that I bought the monopod the other week. I’m certainly going to need that as I work my way around, until I can get to grips with the machine.

And that might take me a few weeks, so I shall have to start to get out and about more often with it.

But I can’t wait to try out its low-light capability.

Feeling now a little better in the leg, with much more bendability, I eschewed the salt bath this afternoon, to give things a chance to settle down.

If I have another good night’s sleep, I’m hoping that I’ll feel even better tomorrow.

We can but hope.

Tea was some more taco rolls with the last of the stuffing that I made. Followed by pears and coconut soya cream.

And now it’s bed time. And I’m ready for it too, even though I had a good lie-in. Another good sleep will do me good and get me ready for Monday.

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