Sunday, April 12, 2009 - Elephant Butte Lake State Park, Elephant Butte NM
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Watering the Onions, Percha Dam State Park, Arrey NM, March 26, 2009
There's a new camera headed my way
I need a better camera. The Canon PowerShot A720 IS I've been using for the past year has been a good little camera but its limitations are starting to, well, limit me. I like its small slip-in-the-pocket form factor and its image stabilization but I'm finding the 6x optical zoom insufficient. Also, it is not great in the low light situations I find myself attracted to. There are great sunrises and sunsets here in New Mexico and I'm unhappy with the amount of noise I'm getting in many of my images.
I'm jealous - Kate Klein over at Cholula Red has been getting such great shots with her Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ28S 10.1MP Digital Camera with 18x Wide Angle MEGA Optical Image Stabilized Zoom (Silver) I decided I had to take her advise and get me one. The FZ28S is too big for the pocket but it's light and reasonably small and I'm finding that most of my shots are taken on short walks around the parks I'm staying at so size is not really the issue I thought it was when I bought the Canon PowerShot A720 IS. Plus the image stabilized 18x optical zoom is amazing! I haven't been a Panasonic fan for many years now but the images Kate has been getting with this camera really caught my attention. We'll soon see how it works out.
There was a not-to-be-missed glorious sunrise here at South Monticello yesterday morning and I missed the whole show! It happened while I was busy putting together an Amazon order for one of those Panasonic cameras. I never even glanced out the window. Sheesh.
Kate didn't miss the show though. Go see her great shots over on her blog.
Night camp
Site 32, South Monticello Point - Elephant Butte Lake State Park, Elephant Butte NM
- Verizon cell phone service - very good
- Verizon EVDO service - very good
- Find other references to Elephant Butte on this website
- List the nights I've camped here
- Go to the Elephant Butte Lake State Park website
- Get a Google map of this area
- Check the weather here
Beware of Hypnotic Media
To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you — from the cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy, fatally easy!, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.