I have at different times seen or heard various serious photographers observing that amateurs and dilettantes (like me) typically think the "bright sunny day" offers some kind of picture-taking gold-standard. When in fact the technical difficulties are actually greater under bright sun than on overcast days with more evenly diffused light. I can be happy enough coping with whatever weather is offered, but on days like the one above with Mabel Watson Payne at our favorite Chinatown playground, a few reasonably balanced and entertaining pictures can only be obtained at the price of numberless and utter failures, either washed out with glare or lost in shadow. The new camera (like this new posting format) offers many new pitfalls alongside its new advantages. Some improvements will still be made, no doubt, as useful knowledge continues to expand (I have a consultation scheduled for next week with a young person who understands Blogger's recent technical shake-up better than I do). At the same time I would be foolish to doubt that whole new families of unresolvable difficulties will remain, forcing invention of new workarounds (including that all-purpose workaround of accepting and then ignoring what you do not like but cannot alter).
On a side note, there has been much debate about what to call the color of Mabel's eyes. I think the picture at bottom is one of the color-truest I have taken with the new camera and to me it suggests that the eye color should be called Topaz. There is a parallel debate about what to call the color of her hair, but that question seems to me still to be too up-in-the-air to address.
