I heard a whippoorwill last night. I think he's going to freeze his tail feathers off after tomorrow! They're forecasting cooler weather for awhile, which figures because every year when my yellow bush blooms the blossoms freeze off (I always forget the name, forsythia maybe). It's starting to bloom now:



I just can't get over being amazed by a camera with a good zoom lens. My old Sony had a 10x lens, which I loved. Then most camera manufacturers got away from good zoom lenses and went to crappy little ones. Well, the old Sony Mavica is still going strong, after almost 15,000 pictures and over 10 years old, but now new computers don't come with floppy drives. More than two years ago when my old K-mart Bluelight Special computer finally died, the replacement computer had no way to get the pictures from my floppy disc camera. Instead of purchasing and messing with an external floppy drive, I searched high and low to find a new camera with equivalent zoom, but didn't have much luck. I finally found a Sanyo movie camera that also took still images, but with only a 6x zoom lens. I was never really happy with it. It always seemed to be lacking when I really wanted to get closeups of my subjects, when I couldn't physically get up close. Aside from that, it takes movies in MPEG4 format and those give me fits whenever I work with them, locking up my editing program etc.

Along came my birthday this year! All I wanted was a camera that could take pictures of the night sky and have something show up in them that at least looks like stars. I researched for many days on the web and came up with a set of specifications that would meet my needs. I found all of that in a Canon SX100 IS at Wal-mart, and a 10x zoom to boot! That 10x lens is like welcoming back an old friend, after missing the Mavica zoom for the past couple years. And combined with the great improvements being made in digital zoom (which will still never ever match good old optics), I am absolutely amazed by the zoom pictures I can capture:

A jet flying overhead yesterday pictured here with no zoom.

The same jet with zoom!

And here's a few photos from last night's photography lesson:

The Big Dipper
ISO speed rating: 400
Shutter speed: 15.0 sec
Aperture: f/2.8
Zoom (Focal length): 33mm (equiv.)*
Exposure bias: +0.0 EV
Original image size: 3264 x 2448 Pixels
Flash used: No
Date taken: Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Time taken: 8:48 PM
Camera make: Canon
Camera model: Canon PowerShot SX100 IS

I thought this one was kind of cool because I captured a jet streaking by.
ISO speed rating: 400
Shutter speed: 15.0 sec
Aperture: f/2.8
Zoom (Focal length): 33mm (equiv.)*
Exposure bias: +0.0 EV
Original image size: 3264 x 2448 Pixels
Flash used: No
Date taken: Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Time taken: 8:56 PM
Camera make: Canon
Camera model: Canon PowerShot SX100 IS

And yet another picture of Orion setting in the west, just behind the sun. I like Orion, but it's too bad he's mostly a cold weather constellation. Soon he'll be gone until next winter.
ISO speed rating: 400
Shutter speed: 15.0 sec
Aperture: f/2.8
Zoom (Focal length): 33mm (equiv.)*
Exposure bias: +0.0 EV
Original image size: 3264 x 2448 Pixels
Flash used: No
Date taken: Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Time taken: 8:57 PM
Camera make: Canon
Camera model: Canon PowerShot SX100 IS

And here's a few pictures of the UFO from last night:

It glided nearly overhead, and shown a powerful beam on the highway only a few yards from me!(wink wink)

Then it landed alongside the irrigation field! (wink wink)

Suddenly the extraterrestrials spotted me taking pictures of their craft! They revved up their propulsion system and took off, out of sight! (wink wink)