7-30-02

In case you're just joining us, my digital camera came yesterday and I've been trying it out.  If you haven't seen the first of those pictures, you can start here.

Late this afternoon I made a quick trip to the coast to snap a few more experimental pictures, after which I returned by the circular route, stopping by the south perimeter of the CSUCI campus.  Here are a few things I saw:

Mid-range tides make for the best waves, it seems, and the water was foamy and crashing this afternoon.  The photo of the shoreline looks wet enough to touch in the full-size version (way too big to post here.)  A flock of pelicans opted for a rest stop in the picture above.

The crisp detail that this camera will capture is still leaving me slack-jawed.  Maybe you can get a little bit of an idea from the picture of the water at right, even though it's a low-quality file.  Water spray in some shots, for example, seems to almost jump right out of the picture.  And the colors are consistently steady and true, a real treat after you've had well-composed pictures fail because of iffy lighting that came out all wrong in the finished print.  And it's still hard to believe I can just fill up the camera, then come home, download and post my pictures directly to the web, or print them if I like.

Mountain panorama at the south edge of the CSUCI campus (Hotel California.)  Atop the first ridge at left is a mysterious little detail that the boys and I always wonder about.  It appears to be a stone cistern, probably only five or six feet high.  Some day I'm going to find out what it actually is and why it was built here at the edge of campus.

Detail of the... object.  I have to admit that whenever I go around the curve in the road that gives way to this view, it immediately reminds me of castles I saw on distant hilltops while traveling in central Spain.