The Australian deer farmer and his wife were deep in conversation over a little compact camera when I approached. Now I don’t normally make a habit of offering to take tourists’ photos for them, because what usually happens is this. Wife: “That would be nice, wouldn’t it, Fred?”. Fred, hands over a flashy little digital camera and attempts a humorous remark, because he’s worrying I’ll cut and run and he paid a little over the odds for his precious compact: “Don’t drop it will you?” Then he usually says more seriously, “It’s all set up. Just stand - here. No - right here!” Too far away of course. The visitors are just dots in the landscape, but hey - it’s their holiday. Fred returns to the group and calls out, “Press the big silver button. No - the one on the top”, he’s speaking more slowly now in case I haven’t handled a digital camera before. I zoom in a little to compose the shot, reset the settings and snap off a couple because Fred was waving his hands about in the first one. Afterwards he grunts his thanks as he inspects the results of your intrusion. The Australians were different and nice. We got into conversation (which is how I found out about the deer farming) until the dogs objected they were on a WALK, not a sit-and-chat. Despite the visitors’ claim that they were not photogenic, didn’t generally take pictures of themselves in the landscape, they allowed me to take - what I hope was - a nice photo of them with Windermere Lake and the Langdales in the background. If you haven’t been to Adelaide Hill go and take a look. Despite being low rise, it really is a perfect view with lake, mountain and sky framed in the curve of the bay. As night fell, I was able to observe several members of an increasingly common species at the lake edge. Each one occupied the far end of a jetty - their territory for the duration. Beautifully silhouetted in the dying rays, the five-legged SLR snappers had been lured out by a spectacular sunset. As I only had my compact and no tripod, I had to be content with steadying myself against the trunk of a tree to record the scene. Sunsets are notoriously difficult to capture on digital. Human vision is most attuned to the green-yellow part of the spectrum. So the sensor in your camera carries twice as many green filters as the red or blue ones in its colour filter array (CFA). The camera sensor effectively captures the image in black-and-white using photoreceptors (sensitive light-traps) embedded on a microchip. Colour information is processed via a transparent mosaic of these filters. The camera checks it has the appropriate mix of colour by comparing the data for each pixel with a set of neighbouring pixels. Since the whole process depends on the camera capturing light, the low light levels at dusk also make the recording of the sunset more tricky. If you want to make the best of a sunset image steady the camera because the shutter speed may be slow. Use a tripod, and as low an ISO setting as you can, set to vivid colour if you have this, and switch the flash off unless you need it to add a fill-n light to the foreground. Even at sunset you should never look directly at the sun and never point the lens directly at the light. The best effects of the sunset may show on other parts of the landscape and sky nearby. Change your focus and eye-level. Hang around and take lots of shots - the light can change, fade and improve minute by minute. Go for gold!