It's Only A Paper Rose

I'm a little disappointed. We've had a bit of hail, and some flurries here and there, but nothing like the 5 to 9 inches the weather report was promising. Still, the wind's been fairly spectacular, and the blizzard warning doesn't expire for another five hours. So we'll see.

Meantime, I got some great shots of the view off of our deck, which (unusually) is partially covered in clouds. I'll have to get some shots when it's sunny too, for comparison.

My new camera has a nifty feature called "Sweep Panorama", where you put the camera in place at one end, press the button, and then sweep it across the view; it then takes all the shots and stitches them together automatically for you. It's a very cool idea, and its implementation is probably about as good as can be expected in a point-and-shoot, but there's definitely a price to pay in quality - likely as not, it's working with very limited onboard memory and can't hold that many high-quality shots and stitch them all together at once. Still, it's great for getting a general feel for a whole scene; you can always take more detailed single pictures of individual segments.

Note that you can click through to see the full-size on all of these.



First, the panorama:




View, stage left:




View, center stage:




View, stage right:




Here I was playing with the (really quite nice) zoom, and got a nice close-up of a spot visible in the panorama. Can you match it up?




I took quite a few shots of our tree. (None of them were the kind of crisp clarity that Brian gets with his camera, but that's to be expected given the difference in camera and lens quality.) This one was my favorite:



Incidentally, both that picture and the one I linked to are of the same tree. Notice how the more recent one kind of bulges out at the bottom? We had to leave out a middle section in order to get the darn thing to fit in our family room. :D

This is just some detritus from Christmas day (actually the first picture I took with the camera), but I liked how the composition came out:



Obviously I got my wish for a yoga DVD, as well as several games. If you want to see the nifty martini picks, though, you're just going to have to come over. I promise it'll be worth the trip - we can play games, and I'll make you one of my famous drinks with a super-classy garnish pick. What's not to like?