There was a time in my life, before my annus horribilis, when I would brag, to those inclined to listen to such claptrap, that I had lived for a decade or so without suffering through a winter and I intended to keep it that way. I thoroughly dislike cold weather and bronchitis seems only a sneeze away when the sky is grey all day and the snow turns brown in the streets. Ugh!

So, it was with a bit of cautious curiosity that I approached the coming of winter in Arizona. Last Saturday morning we awoke to take a little drive to town and noticed the first snows of the season on the mountains surrounding Sedona. Grace’s amused smile tells the story:

Her amusement centered around my Michelin Man appearance. Two shirts, a sweater and a coat were barely keeping me defrosted. Though there was no snow in Sedona itself, we could see mountainsides only a thousand feet or so higher which were heavily dusted. In Sedona we pulled off the highway to climb the hill to The Church of the Red Rocks to savor the spectacular view. The entire front of the chapel there is glassed. While getting your Sunday morning sermon you can let you mind contemplate this view:

We left Sedona on the Oak Creek Canyon road and began to climb toward Flagstaff. Here the dynamic range of light values was so extreme that I had to abandon normal photography techniques to delve into the mysteries of High Dynamic Range composites. I derived this HDR shot from a “stack” of five exposures moving from very underexposed to very overexposed. The software takes the best exposed areas of each image and adds it to the composite. It takes a bit of fiddling, but it allows one to get reasonable images from impossible situations:

A single exposure would show a bright sky with a nearly black mountain in the foreground, since the mountainside was in the shadow of another higher mountain behind me.

This shot, showing the nearly six inches of snow that fell near 7,000 feet would also have been impossible without the HDR technique. A single exposure would show black trees against the white, nearly featureless snow:

As evening neared, the temperature dropped again and the sky appeared in turmoil with fiery accents from the lowering sun:

The new Canon 5D Mk II performs wonderfully at high ISO values. This was shot at 1600 ISO and had only the slightest bit of noise in the darker areas. A light massage by NoiseNinja Pro cleaned it up nicely.

As we approached Sedona on I17 from the North we paused for this wintery show across the intervening valley looking toward the Mogollon Rim:

The image above is a five frame panorama slapped together by Photoshop. As a photograph it was a flop, so I turned it into art. Sometimes imagination beats reality. I’m recalling to words of the classic Kodachrome from Paul Simon’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon of 1973.

Kodachrome . . .
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

Indeed, Kodachrome defined serious color photography for a generation of photographers. For decades major publications would accept photographs on no other media. Recently photographer Steve McCurry trekked through India with the “last roll of Kodachrome” in his camera. The results are far more impressive than any roll of K64 that I ever ran through any of my cameras. I’m glad I didn’t shoot the last roll.

It’s the end of an era, but I’m not looking back. Film is essentially dead, except in the hands of a few quaint eccentrics. The fundamentals of photography have not changed at all, but the media could not be more different. I still think of a digital image file as a “negative”.

How “old school” is that?

I invested considerable effort while I lived in Papua New Guinea to learn as much as I could about my environment and its flora and fauna. There are thousands of images here in my journal, which shall soon need a name change, of many hundreds of mostly accurately identified species. I don’t claim that as any kind of accomplishment, no more than a model railroad geek might brag about the scope of his layout. Hey, it was a hobby. The hobby now continues, except that I’m starting from scratch. I can identify nearly nothing. Oh well, it is  just a hobby.

I intended to write this post a week ago, but a “cooking incident” made typing painful. Last Friday night, with the aid of one of my fancy new ultra-sharp knives that I told Gracie that I must have if I were to be the primary chef, I neatly sliced off the tip of my left pinkie finger. Let me tell you, that knife was exquisitely sharp. I could tell. I felt it glide effortlessly through my tender flesh a full second before there was any pain. Fortunately, I withdrew the dripping appendage before the neatly sliced pile of hard, stinky Italian cheese was contaminated. It’s been an adventure the last few days to learn how to neatly bandage a fingertip. I don’t think it’s possible.

The subject today is a phenomenon which is entirely new to me. Spring has always been my favorite season. The cold weather I hate so much has abated and everything gets a fresh new start. It’s a time for rapid growth and replenishment. All things which appeared dead are resurrected. What I certainly did not expect to see was a spring renewal in the autumn. That appears to be exactly what happens here in the high dessert.

Flowers are everywhere. I have not yet experienced a true spring in Arizona, but I can’t imagine that it would be much more verdant that what I’m observing now. The predominant color is very obviously yellow. In some places entire hillsides take on a sunny hue. A couple of weeks ago plants such as this seemed to have gone dormant after the blazing heat, waiting for the frosts which will probably start tonight, if the forecast holds:

Here is a species which I have seen in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, but I’ve already forgotten the name. The color in PNG is red:

Of course, not everything is yellow:

And, not everything is a flower:

I got this shot from a resort named Enchantment. I can think of only a few places in all my travels where I enjoyed such a scenic lunch. I wondered where the airliner was going. It couldn’t be any place better than where I was:

I was pleasantly surprised the our lunch there cost little more than any decent restaurant in the area. The splendid view was virtually free.

Here are some more yellow flowers:

The roses all around the neighborhood are in a frenzy to produce blossoms which seem impossible for the end of October:

There are a dozen varieties of rose blooming now, as frost nears, along the streets of our neighborhood on the way to the local grocery store:

Milder temperatures probably contribute to the second spring effect, but I suppose the biggest factor is the increase in rainfall. We have had nighttime showers recently and the occasional stormy day. A couple of days ago, on the way back from Cottonwood, we followed this rainbow for about twenty minutes. It was wonderful to watch it move along with us:

In the image above it is hovering over our home. We wondererd if there might be a pot of gold waiting for us.

The roller-coaster of life that I’ve been riding for the last two years has followed some spectacular paths. I feel genuine hope that it might now be settling down for a less thrilling ride. I’ve had to make some pretty difficult decisions on my own. It is very comforting now to once again have a beloved partner with me. Grace and I have set a multitude of wheels turning. All of them now seem to be rolling in a positive direction. Our meager investment accounts are even starting to move upward again after a much too long bankers’ holiday. After the breathtaking ride, I can’t avoid seeing many things as metaphors. The poetry of life is coming back. Arizona, my new home, is experiencing a Second Spring even as I myself am being refreshed and regenerated by the blessings raining down on me.

As corny metaphors go, that’s not too bad.

It was a “do it yourself” marriage ceremony on Saturday afternoon at Beaver Creek near the ranger station at Rimrock, Arizona. It wasn’t covered by TV crews and no circling helicopters were heard. The attire was modest, “Sedona Chic”, as Grace calls it. There were no invited guests, only the participants and local family members. In other words, it was the kind of marriage which maximizes satisfaction while minimizing the fuss.

So, for the second time in my life, I am a married man. I had intended only one, but that was not in accordance with the “Plan.” Paul Simon possibly stated it best in Slip-Slidin’ Away:

God only knows. God makes his plan.
The information’s unavailable to the mortal man.

I say this not to revisit or show a morbid regret for the past, but to celebrate and proclaim my happiness and gratitude for my present blessings. My plan was not the plan of my maker. It took me a long time to stop seeing that as a tragedy. My life has been transformed by some wonderful second chances. All of the love and hard work that Eunie put into molding me into a better man now benefit me even more than in my former life. I have opportunities now to care more, do things better and be aware of and sensitive to things which formerly escaped my attention. I am going to make the best of it, for Grace and for myself.

On Friday afternoon we went to the Safeway store in Sedona to get flowers, a cake and some ice cream for Saturday’s event. We spent most of the evening arranging the flowers into the appropriate bouquets for each of the ladies of the marriage party. I was not, of course, competent to make up the arrangements, but my fingers are nimble enough to wrap the stems with ribbon and tie the knots. We sat them outside to keep them cool overnight. It’s beginning to get very chilly at night here in the high desert:

Grace chose this quiet spot at Beaver Creek for our marriage because it has long been a place of solace and comfort for her. When I saw it first I was also captured by its beauty and simplicity. Next to Grace is Dodie, who stood with Grace during the ceremony. I have no pictures of the marriage itself, because I was rather busy being the groom:

To my right is Verle, Dodies’ husband.

Here is Charity, Grace, me and Pastor Scott of the Montezuma Chapel church near Rimrock. Believe it or not, it’s located on Rusty Spurs Road:

The ceremony was very traditional. Grace and I wrote our vows, which were simple and to-the-point. Pastor Scott covered the usual ground eloquently. I appreciated the low-key tone of our marriage from the planning stage through the ceremony on Sunday. It was a marriage suited to a man’s tender nerves. I had only a couple of days of pre-marriage jitters. This will make it much easier on me when we plan and carry out our “wedding” in April of next year.

Little Tana, Grace’s granddaughter, is on the left. She did not care much for the camera. Next to Grace is Diana, her daughter-in-law. Next to me is Jay, Grace’s son, who stood with me:

It was all over in about an hour. We had swimmers in the background for most of the time, but they kindly removed themselves when they noted that we were taking pictures.

We had a very small reception back at home with Grace and I, Jay, Diana and Tana. We could not find any wedding theme decorations for the cake, so we settled for Minnie Mouse lounging on a sugary beach while watching Mickey hanging ten on a frosting wave:

We gave all of the flowers to Diana and Jay to take to their church the next morning. We took that remaining ice cream and cake to church with us on Sunday. We don’t allow such deadly dietary items to remain in our home.

Finally, we have the obligatory “hands with rings” shot:

I can’t escape the notion that I ought to be writing a great deal more about this life-changing event for Grace and I. However, words escape me for the time being. It seems as if nothing more need be said. Our decision to marry came as naturally as a warm summer rain. Our decades-long friendship serves us well. Disagreements are few, usually trivial and easily settled. We share a comfort with life as it happens that comes with maturity, no small amount of wisdom, deep love and some very hard knocks.

Life can be perfect, if you squint your eyes a little. I like the way Grace puts it, we are “Perfecting the perfection.”

I won’t belabor the obvious. I posted only once in September. This is my first post in October. It would be a gross understatement to say that something is happening. In fact, a great many things are happening. I have been “busy”. That word covers a huge swath of ground. The day-to-day changes are not amusing, so I’ll not waste precious time by accounting for them here. The big changes pretty much take my breath away. In the space of a little over a year I have made countless difficult. perplexing but sometimes happy decisions at a time when I’m not supposed, according to popular wisdom, to be making any substantial decisions at all. I won’t go back over those either. Once is enough.

However, I might tally up the results. I have disposed of nearly every possession which I previously owned, except for some technical gear (what man can live without it?) a bit of furniture and my meager wardrobe. I have traveled here and yon for months searching for my future. I have wooed and won my life long friend, Grace. She was (and presumably still is) the life long friend of my late wife, Eunie. I have relocated the stage for the last acts of my life half way around the world from wet and wild Madang to dry and wild Sedona. If that’s not enough, well . . . okay, I’m getting married again this Saturday afternoon.

Whew!

And this is me, charging bravely, if still somewhat clueless, into whatever comes next:

Uhhh . . . well, no. Actually, that’s not me. I am not nearly so handsome. Grace and I, on her birthday this Monday, visited Out of Africa at Camp Verde, Arizona. I have never been to a wildlife park before. The glitz factor has, until now, kept me at bay. I like Out of Africa, because my perception is that there is far more focus on the animals themselves than on providing excessive comfort and pizazz to appeal to jaded tourists. Frankly, much of the park is ever so slightly shabby. That appeals to me when viewed beside the care and concern offered to the animals.

Watching the gorgeous white tiger being exercised in the enclosed area containing a large pool was one of the most exciting and interesting animal exhibits I’ve seen. Though one might blink at the idea of tigers out of Africa, nothing else in this show is fake. The big predators here might appear to be tame, but the handlers insist that they do not train them in any way. The say that they take care to give the big cats experiences which are as close to hunting as can be devised in captivity. Here Chalet, the white Bengal takes another dramatic leap into the water:

Why the huge lunges into the pool? The answer is in this shot:

I imagine that the park tigers puncture enough large inflatable plastic toys each year to keep a small Chinese factory going. It is one leap – one shredded blow up. The tiger always gets what it’s after:

In the shot above it’s interesting to examine the focus of the tiger’s attention. It it clearly on the toy and not on the handler. As you watch the show this tactic becomes clear. The toy is the game, not the person controlling it. The cats don’t seem to mind the fakery. The handler in the image above will soon flip the toy over the tiger’s head and run like crazy for the pool, making certain that he is well away from the toy when the tiger lunges powerfully through the air at the sailing object. The puffy plastic will suffer the same fate as a leaping antelope.

Some of these antics are so stunning that I don’t really feel like commenting about them. The images speak much more elegantly than I:

I was worried that shooting through the chain-link fence would be a problem. As it turns out the shallow depth of field of the Canon 300mm telephoto lens saved the day. It focused flawlessly on the main subjects while blurring the fence enough so that it is not too distracting.

The big cats, lions, tigers and a lone black leopard are not the only denizens of the park. Here is Grace having her hand washed by one of the giraffes’ sixteen inch purple tongue. This is a sensory treat which I have, so far, avoided:

And here is something that you don’t see every day:

It is amusing to watch the giraffe as it withdraws from the coach. It carefully lowers its head just enough to avoid konking its knobby antlers on the window frame.

I have a couple of more leaping tiger shots for you. I set the Canon 5D MkII for rapid fire. It usually digests five frames per second at full resolution, though it does occasionally stutter at an imappropriate moment. I think this is because my memory card is not quite fast enough to keep up:

What you see above and below are nice examples of what the handlers are trying to accomplish. One must suppose that everybody is winning here. The paying audience is certainly getting their $36 worth, even better if you’ve gotten in on one of the common half-price deals. The big cats appear to be getting some much needed aerobic exercise and having what passes for fun in captivity. The handlers, hopefully well paid, are getting an adrenalin rush second to none.

Once in a while the tiger gets the jump on the toy and the handler, preparing to flip the thing over the top for a good leap, gets jerked onto his back in mid-air:

Out of Africa is a little off the beaten path, but well worth the trip. For family fun at a very reasonable price you would be hard pressed to beat it.

I got fitted for my getting married outfit today. I won’t be spectacular, but Grace will certainly look classy, as she always does. We are going down by Beaver Creek where the wonderful red rocks are reflected in the water.

Maybe I’ll get some good pictures. I don’t really care as long as I get that ring on my finger.

As you may surmise from the title, I’m in St. Louis. I’ve been enjoying myself with Grace’s daughter, her husband and their children. I have felt very subdued for the last few days. I am trying very much to avoid recalling details of life one year ago, as Eunie was dying before our eyes. Grace has wisely helped me with this and bravely avoids adding her own pain and loss to mine. It has helped very much to concentrate on the blessings which have been gifted to us instead of the loss we have suffered. I take a great deal of comfort in knowing that this is exactly what Eunie would suggest, indeed, insist.

Today’s tardy post consists of a few deranged ramblings and some images I contrived over a week ago.  This panorama, consisting of four or five frames (can’t remember and who cares) from the Canon 5D, jumped out at me while standing at Yavapai Vista, about halfway between “High” Sedona (I love that expression) and the Village of Oak Creek, where we live. It’s more or less right from the camera, except for the stitching. I wish you could see it in high resolution:

I brought all of the new gear to St. Louis with me so that I can practice using it and shoot some video of the kids for the family. They will be my wiggly little guinea pigs. I shot a half-hour of footage a few days ago and have patched it into a little movie, which I will display to the general public (you) as soon as I can get Facebook to digest it. I shot it hand-held, because I did not want to frighten the children when I don the SteadiCam gear and make my appearance as Mr. Roboto (Does anybody except me remember Styx? Very funky!):

If you get this rig balanced right the camera becomes weightless. In fact, you can even adjust it so that it takes the weight of your arm. It looks very awkward, but after a while it begins to feel natural and is a lot of fun. I’ll bring it out for the kids later.

Here are a few pitiful images of a . . . uh . . . place, hmmmm . . . don’t know what to call it, in Sedona which has one of the most marvelous collection of kitsch I believe I have ever seen. That may be a slight exaggeration, since I’ve seen a whole lot of kitsch during my strange journeys around this planet:

I think the place is called Skulls ‘Я’ Us. I hate that use of the backwards R. It’s kitschy.

Well, I have to wrap this up. I’ve been three days writing it. I don’t think it will improve with further aging. Several captions come to mind for this image. They revolve around the idea of multilevel kitsch or Reflections on Kitch or Kitch² :

Surely there must be a larger collection of Mexican crockery someplace:

Peeking thorough the hanging chilis they are colorful and cheery, even in the flat light of a cloudy day.

I’ve been thinking about star trails. It calms me. I took the camera and tripod out on the front steps a few nights ago, while I was still in Sedona. I call this a failed shot. It is considerably more complicated than I imagined:

I’ll have to keep trying.

I’ve been playing lonely guy for the last two weeks and I don’t like it one bit. I’ve come to the conclusion that I am only part human. My orangutan-like arms attest to this conclusion. If the rest of me were more like my cousins, I’d probably get along fine, as they are rather solitary beasts. I, however, am much less happy to be alone. The main problem is that I get bored with nobody to talk to. Well, I’ll get relief in a week. I’ll be off to St. Louis to be with Grace and her daughter and family. Grace is a new grandmother again. I’m gonna take about a million pictures and shoot hours of video.

Which brings me to today’s subject. Golf. No, of course not. I am not a golfer. That’s too bad, actually, since I could stand outside our front door and throw a golf ball onto one of the prettiest golf courses I’ve ever seen, not that I’ve seen very many. Anyway, I’m going to start on the night before and walk you through a photographic expedition from our house to the golf course. You don’t need a back pack. It takes only about one minute, unless you have a camera. Then it takes about a half-hour.

Last night I set up the new Canon 5D Mk II with the EF 40-70mm ƒ4 L USM lens on a tripod outside the front door and shot directly across the street. This was a thirty second exposure with an ISO of 3200, I think. At that ISO reproducing at normal sizes shows no detectable noise. When the width of an image is over 5,600 pixels, noise gets pretty much buried in the mass of dots of color. I spend far less time cleaning up images.

I got lucky in this shot when a car passed by the house. Notice that the shutter was open was long enough to produce perfect little star trails. You’ll have to click to enlarge to see them.

I woke up at 05:30 the next morning and went to the front door to see how smoky it was outside. We have had many fires lately. Much of it is “managed burns”, but it’s just as smoky, no matter the cause of the fire. Here is a site showing current wildfires over one-hundred acres. This morning was about as clear as I have seen and the sun was at a perfect angle to sculpture the famous red rocks. After I crossed the dry wash and made my way to the top of the bank I set up the tripod and grabbed this shot:

This is a different kind of spectacular from the scenes out my front door in Madang, but I can get used to it.

I then made my way back down into the dry wash for a little stroll to the golf course, only about a hundred feet along the path. Along the way I spotted deer tracks:

Unmistakeable, eh?

But how about this?

After checking the area for other tracks and a visit to the World Wide Web for confirmation, I’m convinced that there was a rather large elk wandering around the neighborhood while I was out spying on the house across the street last night. It seems that elk tend to put the hind foot nearly in the same spot as the front foot hit the ground as they walk. This accounts for the distorted shape. The front of the indentation shows the characteristic cloven hoof pattern of an ungulate.

Well, that’s got precious little to do with golf, but I’m getting to that.

At the top of the bank a few feet further on is the perimeter road of the golf course. There are many presumably rich people housed around the course. Once again I find myself a man of very modest means living like a prince. The road is a popular place for a morning constitutional:

Up at the end of the course I got this tripod shot of the scene. I could have done quite nicely without the tripod, but though the gear is capable, my arm is not. That rig is heavy, man. My biceps will soon be bulging again:

In the past I have shot stitched-together panoramas to get landscapes such as this, but with over twenty-one million pixels, all I have to do is crop out the middle. Unless this was blown up bigger than an 8×10 inch sheet, you would never see any pixelation.

Really, there’s not much that this camera can’t do, given the right lens. I wonder what some of the great photographic geniuses of the past would make of the equipment and software we have today. It would be something to see, I’m sure.

The morning light was very soft and warm. The sky was nearly white. I used a circular polarizer filter to darken it as much as possible, but I still had to fake a blue sky in this shot:

I’m afraid it shows, eh? Well, it’s just an interpretation, so I don’t care. It would make a nice post card.

If you like golf.

Kiddies, if you have little interest in photography other than pictures of the kids or pets, then have a quick peek at the pretty pictures below and move along. You’ll soon be bored. I’ve been playing just a little (took time out to eat, sleep and do some house cleaning) with the new Canon 5D Mk II and the two lenses I purchased. All this fuss with new gear is primarily about my new job. It will likely be a few months  until I get my first assignments. I have to return to Madang to finish up my life there before I can begin in earnest anew here in Sedona. In the meantime, I have my work cut out for me. I have to learn a new camera which is far more complex than anything I’ve ever had before and I need to learn to do production quality HD video from the ground up. I’ve already started on that. I’m afraid that posts for the next few months are going to be pretty geeky. At least you will see some amusing images and learn how an old dog learns fancy new tricks.

I have noted that no matter how good I thought I was, the 5D Mk II has humbled me. I’ve known the basics of photography since I was old enough to point a camera. Since it was my dad’s main interest, he taught me little else. I inherited a Busch Pressman camera and was working with smelly chemicals in the basement by the time I was eleven. The 5D is a whole new ball game. Let me say first that it shoots absolutely stunning images on full, flat-out Automatic. You could not find a camera that will give you a higher percentage of superb shots if you never want to crack open a manual for a nice bedtime read. Just leave the knob set on the little green box, swap lenses around as you please and shoot, shoot shoot. If you have any compositional sense at all you will be shooting National Geographic style shots from day one. And, you will mightily impress your friends. Which leads me to the only reason I can think of for a family album shooter to have one – to impress your friends. You had better hope they know something about photography or they will laugh at you for buying such a huge clunker of a camera. Really, if you never want to print anything bigger than an 8 x 10 print, then buy a good quality super-zoom such as the Canon Canon Power Shot SX30IS for less than $400.

One of the many differences between the two (5D Mk II vs. SX20IS) is the the SX30IS provides many pre-programmed shooting modes which allow a shooter who has taken an afternoon off to discover them to create a wide variety of beautiful images which would have required considerable technical knowledge in times past. The 5D has none of this. It does have a superb Automatic mode, but you have to cook the fancy creative images youself. This requires a fair level of both knowledge of the technical aspects of photography (The Exposure Triangle, etc.) and the complexities of the massive control range of the camera itself.

Come to think of it, there is another good reason to buy a 5D Mk II. If you are serious about making excellent images, for whatever reason, and you want to buy a camera which will keep you happy for say, ten years, then the 5D and a couple of good lenses might be the ticket. You could possibly end up spending a similar amount of money over ten years stepping up from one camera to another and never be as good with any of them as you would be after a few years with the 5D. She would be as dependable and wise (and as amusing) as a good wife. Okay, that’s going too far. You get the idea. Believe me. You will want to name your 5D. Something this precious deserves a moniker. Just promise yourself one thing before you invest. If you lose interest and it ends up gathering dust on a shelf, pass it along to a promising photographer who can’t afford it. Give him or her an offer which can’t be refused. This is a camera which deserves to be used by someone who can learn to make it sing.

Speaking of singing, I wanted to do something a little special for the first image I show from the 5D. Frankly, I could have shot this with my G11, but that’s not the point. This image represents a change of shooting habits. I have seldom been so frightened in my long, wayward and adventurous life as I was when I was crossing over those rocks with a new 5D and two top-notch lenses. If I had my G11 there and I slipped I’d simply toss it to the other bank, pick it up, wipe the mud off and shoot. Not so with the fancy gear. Honestly, if I did not need the capabilities of this rig for my work (the HD video is broadcast-quality) I would never even risk having it. Anyway, back to the image.  I bought a variable density filter which allows me to cut the light down drastically so that I can make long exposures in brightly lighted scenes. In this shot I could hardly see through the filter. Setting the camera appropriately for a twenty second exposure, I got this silky water image at Red Rock Crossing near the house in Oak Creek Village. In order to fancy it up a bit more, I spent a quarter of an hour fooling around with Artistic Filters in Photoshop. I’m going to print this one and hang it on the wall, after asking Grace, of course.

You really have to click to enlarge it to see what’s going on.

Here’s a similar image shot with another lens on full automatic mode:

You really can’t appreciate the quality of this image at the resolution I have to use to make it manageable for the web. The original RAW file was twenty-six megabytes!

I can’t live without macro photography. I’d sooner give up my one beer a day. (Hey, I gave up my one cigar a day habit. Give me a break.) I was concerned that my Canon 17-40 F4.-5.6 L USM lens would not cut the mustard. This is about a 30% crop of the center of a full frame at 40mm focal length:

That was as close as I could get while allowing the auto focus to operate. Someday I might find a used macro lens for the camera, but it can wait a while. This makes me happy. I won’t be blowing up any ants as big as small dogs, but I still have my G11, which is actually a better macro rig.

There is a nice little pub within easy walking distance from our house. It’s called PJ’s Village Pub and Sports Lounge. I went over a couple of nights ago to meet a friend for a little conversation. It was storming beautifully outside. After it was nearly over I went outside an snapped this cute little shot:

It’s had a pleasant massage from Photoshop to correct the colors to what my imagination requires, but otherwise, it’s straight out of the camera.

Earlier, inside PJ’s, I set the 5D on full auto and held it parallel to the mirror on the wall for this tasty image:

This is a 17mm shot. It shows little objectionable distortion common to wide angle images. I’m quite happy with it. Other than the removal of an ugly power outlet under the mirror, this is right out of the camera.

For this last little bit of play, I wanted to test several things at once. First I wanted to see if I could really get five frames per second out of the 5D. I want to try some portraits on burst mode. I find it difficult to get just the right expression when doing portraits. I’m going to try getting all set up, provoking the right mood and then letting fly with about a hundred exposures over maybe twenty seconds. Then I can pick just what I’m after. Next, I wanted to see how good the 64oo ISO setting is. I’ve never been able to shoot this sensitive before. My G11 dies a horrible noisy death over 400 ISO. (The results show that the 5D Mk II is four or five stops better for noise.) Finally, I wanted to gen an idea how well Microsoft Photosynth could stitch together the shots for a 3D walk-around presentation. Here is the result, using our home office as a test subject:

Well, I’m sure that you were fascinated at that. I have more worthy subjects in mind. How about a walk down Oak Creek Canyon, peering into holes and turning over rocks in the stream?

Maybe I had better save that for HD video. My next project is a home-made flying camera rig.