Super Zoom LUMIX DMC-ZS7

Lately, since we have the four kids, the only camera I’ve been travelling with has been my Lumix (Panasonic) DMC-ZS7 CLICK HERE!.

When we were on the Ferry to go visit Grandpa Scott and Great Grandma Scott, I took these two pictures to demonstrate the power of the digital superzoom that the camera has.

This first shot is zoomed out all the way to the 35mm equivalent of 25mm, which is a really wide angle for a single lens camera, and wider than most DSLR kit lenses.

Notice, you can barely see the barge and tug off in the distance in the middle of the frame beneath the white cloud. In this next shot, I zoomed in to the end of my 12x optical zoom which would be 300mm 35mm equivalent. Which is pretty impressive.

In the next shot, since it was so bright and  just to experiment, I zoomed in on the tug, all the way to the end of what LUMIX calls its intelli zoom, which maxes out at 16x/23.7x. I’m not sure why sometimes it zooms farther. It does this obviously by cropping in on an already miniscule 12mp sensor. Still, the results are impressive at web resolution.

I find that to be amazing… Cropping in on this picture gives the expected results…

This is all the more impressive when you can buy this model camera on Ebay for around $160, buy-it-now, like I did.

Little Feet

Time for the one month old photos. Here are some feet and Mother’s hands.

The comforter on the master bed is black, which makes for a nice backdrop.

Our new family picture

Here we are dressed up for Christmas Eve Service. We stayed in Haines, as we’ve been quite busy lately. We got the boy’s tuxedos off Ebay for about $24 each: Ring Bearer tuxes for weddings. I guess we lsot Mark’s tie and I need a white shirt.

When we bought the latest tux, I forgot to find one with tails for Mark, so his has a standard cut jacket and no vest. The idea is that we’ll just hand them down as each boy is done with his and we’ll only ever need to buy one per year.

Winter Wonderland…

It’s been a winter wonderland up here. We got 14 inches of snow night before last and it’s starting to snow in earnest now.

The boys build a fort this morning.

The wood-stack tries to stay dry under the tarp.

The snow hangs off the roof over the kitchen window.

The day-stack of wood on the porch, nice and dry under the roof, with mixed remains of Mark’s hatchet work to make kindling.

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The view from the porch: we can’t even see the water, due to the snowfall.

Snow fort construction.

Heavily snow-laden trees tower over the 7.5 cord wood-shed.

Go little pink clothes! Go!

Holly has been washing clothes for the last few days, as we have finally moved into the new house. After being packed in boxes for six weeks, some of the clothes needed to be freshened up.

When she poured this pile of pink, purple, and red clothes onto the bed for folding, I just had to cheer for them:

“Go little baby pink clothes! Go!”

In my estimation, these pink clothes are the definite under-dog in the race to which set of clothes will be selected to be on the starting team when the time comes. We already have three boys and the blue, brown, and green clothes are sitting confidently on the shelf.

It’s not that I wouldn’t be happy with another boy. We love our boys. But it would be nice if Holly had a girl, I think.

What do you think?

Lighting of the Fort!

We attended the lighting of the fort again this year. Holly has arranged the live nativity scene for the past five years or so. This year the weather was the worst in memory. Awful. Jim Green said it’s the fifth one he’s been to since they moved here.

It has been snowing and raining, cold and windy all day, but it was not cancelled. With five minutes to go, there was no one around, but after the canon fired off at 5 pm, about 30 people climbed out of their cars and trudged over to the back of Tresham’s shop to sing and spectate.

The Haines Women’s Acapella Chorus sang a special number, along with a number of songs that Holly led. Luke was a ram with curly horn. Hunter was Joseph, Sasha was Mary, Jesus was a doll, and a bunch of others were sheep, shepherds, and wise-men.

Bob and Margaret braved the freezing rain/snow and ankle deep water under 18 inches of snow.

After the nativity scene, the fort put on a wiener roast with hot cider, chilli, chips, cookies, salad, cold cider, and two warm fires.

It was pretty cute to see John Caleb’s interest in the fire, he saw everyone heading over to the fire with hot-dogs on sticks and he grabbed a stick with his thick mittens on headed straight for the fire himself, not really realizing that he did not have a hot dog on it  yet.

It was so wet out that I had to resort to a zip-lock bag over the flash, camera combo,

Multi-Tasking

So we had a busy weekend of playing house. Holy cleaned and straightened (the house looks wonderful—thank you Holly), while I worked on the straightening out the electrical system. We now have the light at the end of the walkway that Holly wanted me to put in last year, ready for the coming dark winter months.

I put a motion sensor in the lamp but it didn’t seem to work, perhaps it only works in the dark and stays of during the daytime. I’ll experiment with it later. I split up a circuit that we had in the house. The outside lights were on the same circuit as the interior entryway hall light, which was really lousy when we wanted to leave the outside lights on at bedtime. To put in a new light switch, I used the Fein Multi-tool to plunge cut a hole in the log cabin for the light switch. I strongly recommend the Fein tool.

The photo above was shot with my LUMIX DMC-ZS7 at ISO 125, f/3.3, and 1.6 seconds, handheld believe it or not. I find it amazing that a picture like this can be handheld for 1.6 seconds with image stabilization. Of course, there is no need to be shooting at ISO 125 after dark.

Then we went out to Chilkoot Lake to see the bears. We saw the sow with the radio collar and three cubs. You can see the mother bear multi-tasking in the picture below.

After viewing the bears, the boys wanted to get a drink at the green fountain near the lake so we had an impromptu photo session with some eager posers.

Mark had fun showing his guns, as did Luke. Be sure to check out the photo album below by clicking on the View Full Album link.

View Full Album

This photo album above is not really of my design. It is automatically generated using Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer. I recommend that anyone wanting to write a blog with photos throughout use Windows Live Writer as it really makes it easy to put photos and text.

Dr. Seuss ABC book reading by Holly

Holly likes to read to the boys like this as she puts them to sleep.  My favorite method is to grab a pile of books and get them all under the covers in the big bed and read nice and slow until they all drop off, then take a nap myself. My method isn’t as video worthy as hers, in my opinion, but you be the judge as to which is more soporific.

I shot this with my new Lumix Point & Shoot camera, DMC-ZS7, in 720p HD video and uploaded to YouTube.  I should probably be out fishing at Boat Harbor, but I wanted to come home and do stuff like this for a couple days.

I strongly recommend the Lumix ZS series cameras—the only thing I don’t like about them is that you must still switch back and forth between playback and shooting mode by moving a slider, rather than half-way depressing the shutter release button.

I think Holly does a GREAT job reading to the boys, and to the kids at the library. This video can be played in full 720p HD resolution on Youtube, so if you want to really watch it in its best form, Go to Youtube hit the high resolution button and let it download the whole thing before playing.

A day trip to Sheep mountain

On Monday, Ron Horn and I went up to Sheep mountain to take pictures of the sheep. We were on the road by 6:40 AM and were up at the border by 7:30 and were scoping the mountain for sheep amongst the snow at 10:30 AM. We took his car and he drove all the way-so I just had to keep him a wake and keep an eye out for wildlife.

I like going shooting with Ron for a number of reasons: he’s got great photo gear, he knows a lot about photo stuff, he’s smart, he loves a good story, and has a lot of stories and experience he likes to share from all branches of life.  Of course we share photo stories of all sorts.

He just got back from Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean, the site of the famous battle during WWII which was the turning point of the Pacific theater. Lots of cool stories and interesting folks there.

At first we thought we’d have a tough time of it, because all the sheep we spied were high up resting in the sun.  Then Ron spotted this one who wasn’t near as shy.

All-in-all I counted 34 of them, so there were probably around 40, counting the ones I did not see. The seem to be browsing on the gravel, but were probably eating lichens and mosses.

We also saw this fox along the way, just on the other side of Haines Junction. At first he didn’t seem shy at all, but then when I got out of the car, he thought better of it.

Of course there were the usual sights of snow removal and such as we came over the pass which while it may not interest locals much, as it’s a common spectacle in these parts, I think it’s amazing that a machine can throw hundreds of pounds snow per minute so far. when we actually got abreast of the blower, he turned off the blades and let us pass in peace.

Here’s picture of Ron’s car when he went ahead to get the gear while I stayed at the base of the mountain with all the photo gear. I include this shot just to give you an idea of the mountains immediately adjacent to Sheep Mountain and the condition of the road.  If you compare the snow covered mountain in the background with the one the sheep are on in the photos, you can see that the one that the sheep select to spend the spring-time months on is nearly clear of all snow, while the surrounding mountains are almost completely covered in snow this time of year.

I also point out that Ron has the perfect car for out-door photo trips in Alaska—a very modern Toyota 4WD 4 cylinder SUV. The temperature was probably around 22-25 degrees F.

We were back in Haines by 3:40 PM.

Christmas 2009

Here are some cool Northern Lights we saw yesterday in the early morning looking off to the north.

I’m kidding.  This was 2.5 second exposure taken handheld at ISO 3200, wide open of Mark Daniel swinging his glow in the dark wrist bands around energetically to the beat of a Boy Named Sue.

It snowed about 14-18 inches on Christmas Eve, so we had a mess to dig out of in the morning before we could go and get Bob and Margaret for the Christmas morning festivities.  The boys all chipped in and dug with their new shovels and Holly seemed to enjoy doing an Alaskan Woman thing as well.

Holly’s Birthday party was on Christmas evening and we had a nice visit with the family and Bob & Margaret with Margaret’s home made lemon cake with real whipping cream.

Holly’s big gift for her Birthday was an Aero Garden from Amazon which is assembled and percolating away in the living room with herbs (Parsley, Mint, Italian Basil, Dill, Purple Basil, Chives, and Thyme)  hopefully sprouting this week.

Also, I got a large griddle (10”x20”) for cooking pancakes for $44 at the Canadian SuperStore.  It works fine, it turns out, but is a little bit of a pain to clean if you don’t rinse it right away—which is, I suppose, the same as any other cooking or preparation devices. It’s also a bit of a pain to store, as there are no holes in the handles to hang the thing from. I’d always thought these would be great for cooking pancakes or french toast, and just bought one on the spur of the moment. 

One of Holly’s ideas for the Holidays was to spread the gifts out over 12 days, since we’re not planning any big trips.  This morning, the boys got their Nerf guns with a brief safety demonstration and strict instructions on where they could be aimed (not at mommy, not at a face). 

 

But later one of the boys shot the other one in the eye from 3” and lost his gun privileges and got a few swats. Thankfully, no harm was done to John Caleb’s eye.  Although I do feel a bit bad about the spankings. They seem to always do more harm than good.