Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM

Coming to Roost, Sandhill Cranes, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, January 26, 2010

I like this silhouette enough to put a larger copy over at my Birds Series of photos.

The new camera I ordered yesterday, a Canon EOS 7D 18 MP CMOS Digital SLR Camera with 3-inch LCD and 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM Standard Zoom Lens, arrived from Amazon this afternoon and I managed to get a battery charged and learn enough about the camera to go off with Kate & Terry on a sunset photo shoot at the Bosque.

This is one of the few keepers I got out of about 150 shots. Trying to capture the wonderful birds here at the Bosque has made me so aware of the limitations of my old Panasonic DMC-FZ28 that I've been concentrating so much on learning to manually control my camera that I've been taking way to many poorly thought out "oh, look, a bird!" pictures. The DMC-FZ28 is a great little point & shoot camera but it just isn't up to shooting birds in low light. It will be nice to get enough control of this new beast that I can pay more attention to what I'm shooting than to the camera.

Facing South, Sandhill Cranes, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, January 26, 2010

Why do the cranes so often face southward at the evening roost?

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

Beware of Hypnotic Media

To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you — from the cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy, fatally easy!, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.

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