Saturday, January 16, 2010 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM
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Bosque Dawn, San Antonio NM, January 16, 2010
This darned camera
This darned camera I'm using, a nice little Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ28K 10MP Digital Camera with 18x zoom is frustrating me. It's a pretty good camera for what it is designed for but I see now I'm trying to work outside it's design envelope. Dawn and dusk are magical times in New Mexico. The landscape and wildlife come to life early and late in the day and I'm having a hard time capturing the magic with this camera. I spent the greater part of the day today trying to get control of the camera so I can get better pictures of birds on the wing. Granted my technique lacks a lot but I'm finding the controls hard to, well uh, ..control. Plus I'm realizing the small sensor in these little cameras just can't gather enough photons fast enough to get a useable image of birds in flight in these low light situations. I'm going to have to give up trying or get better equipment. This little hobby could get expensive if I'm not careful. gotta go - I hear cranes calling....
Night camp
Site 16 - Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park, San Antonio NM
- This is a basic, small Mom & Pop RV Park with full hookups.
- Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are available here with a strong signal.
- Locate Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park on my Night Camps map
- Click for Google street view
- Check the weather in San Antonio NM
Emptiness
Emptiness shouldn't be thought of as a negative. A lot of people misconstrue that as meaning the opposite of something is nothing. But this is something slightly different. I don't want to get into comparative religious things because that's a complicated topic. But if we were to think about it, the problem of life and death has to do with what comes in between, and what comes in between is an awful lot of suffering. We're not just talking about the pain of suffering, we're talking about suffering. Our common everyday parlance it's called stress. That's a kind of suffering and we die from this. From the standpoint of Zen Buddhism this life isn't some sort of stage mock-up for something else that comes after this. This is what we have. We're right here and we're being in this present moment. What you want to think about when you think about emptiness is a way in which to stay present. Just as, in a way, in a very strange kind of concept, there really is no such thing as time. There's no dress rehersal for anything.
The Artful Mind, Reverend Sohaku Flagg, Rinzai Buddhist priest, in an interview with Nanci Race, Jan/Feb 2003