I spent most of the morning ordering a new camera and accessories, but given the unusually good weather, it would have been wrong not to actually take some pictures as well. So, I took "the small camera" (a Ricoh GX100) for a walk this afternoon, with the intention of just playing around with the manual-focus macro mode and different aperture settings. But the last few days of good weather appear to have tricked a few flowers into coming out, and I got some interesting shots. Unfortunately my Gorillapod broke yesterday, it would have been perfect for the kind of shooting I was doing. Most of the shots used a 2 second or 10 second self-timer, with camera support improvised with a bag of kidney beans in a ziplock bag (or just setting the camera on the ground). Depending on the support, 2 seconds may not be long enough for vibrations to damp out, and so a 10 second delay seems to give better results (assuming the light doesn't change). 

The Ricoh is great for this kind of work, because it's small enough you can position in the scene without disrupting things.   Unfortunately, such camera placements often make it pretty hard to evaluate the composition. It would be awesome to have a direct feed from the camera's sensor to a laptop or other nice detached screen, especially with support for 100% zooming in to support manual focus. A focus-bracketing mode would also be great. Hopefully someday you'll be able to buy cameras that are open for software development (like Android phones)---it would open up some really interesting possibilities for digital photography.

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