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
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.