Fun with Camera Settings

Today was play with your camera day! Well, technically, it was Oxford day, but our photography focus for the day was to play around with unique features on our cameras. I’ve been to Oxford before and I’ve been to most of the places we visited on this trip, so pictures weren’t that important to me. However, this gave me more free time to get creative, which was fun. We took a train to Oxford and since I love old pictures of train tracks, I decided to go crazy taking sepia pictures of train tracks. I just happened to accidentally get part of a town in this one on the right. It’s also a little blurred because we were moving so fast that even my sports setting couldn’t completely freeze the motion. I like the effect though. As one of my flatmates mentioned, it looks very “vintage,” which she feels is very fitting for encompassing the Oxford experience, because Oxford is such a “timeless” little town.

 

We left from Paddington Station, so we just had to track down the statue of the Paddington Bear while we were in the station. He used to be situated by the Paddington Bear shop, but they recently moved him, so locating him literally turned into a game of hide and seek, with a bunch of us going up and down escalators. Turns out, he is now on the main floor, below the shop. Which was, of course, the last place we looked.

I do have a couple of normal pictures from today. I had a friend take this one of me in front of the Bodleian Library, which was something I didn’t do last time I was in Oxford. I wasn’t a MLIS student then, though, which now makes having such a picture extra special. And I couldn't resist taking a picture of this adorable house with green shutters. Plus, I was very glad that I got to take a better picture of the sign above the Eagle and Child pub, which is the pub where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien used to hang out. In addition, I also now have a panoramic view of the university, which I didn’t get last time ‘round, because I didn’t know how to take a panoramic picture last time. I suppose I am improving as a photographer. Although, I will never compare to my sister or my photography student friends.

 

 

 Panorama of the University

 Sadly, I couldn’t find the greenery and floral path we went down last time, which was the one things I would have liked to get more pictures of. I wish I could have located the hobbit sized door again, but oh well. I spent most of the rest of the day playing around with my camera and taking pictures of little, unusual items, like this sundial and this dodo statue. Lewis Carroll also lived in Oxford for a while, so the dodo is related to that piece of literary history. The dodo scene is one of my favorite comedic bits from the book, so I have a special place in my heart for dodos. Some of my favorite playing-around photos include this sepia photo of chairs and glasses just outside the cathedral, this picture of a lamppost that I took with my vivid color setting, and picture of an old typewriter (which was attached to some huge contraption) taken in the story museum.