Some Spring Snow

You’ve got to admire The Weather Network when it comes to their consistancy. Light rain they said for yesterday. Well, it wasn’t ideal, but I could probably handle a bit of light rain.

That’s their idea of light rain. Good thing they didn’t say it would snow or we’d have had flooding. You can usually count on them getting it wrong. In any case, it snowed and it seemed like a good idea to get out with a camera even if I was feeling like utter crap. The latest flu is making the rounds of our home.

I decided I was overdue for a walk though Kinsmen Park here in town with a camera, so I grabbed the bag with the Canon EOS 50D in it and made for the door. I was careful to make sure that I had the correct type of batteries in the bag this time, but I still didn’t get everything right.

We’re at that odd time of year where everything is transitioning from mostly dead and brown to the occasional pop of green, mostly from evergreen trees and grass that is newly arisen. I find the latter to be most appropriate on an Easter Sunday.

This is also the time of year when mortal peril returns to Strathmore in the form of Cobra Chickens, sometimes also referred to as Canadian Geese. The constant honking lets you know you’d better step off, muthaf@#$ah. They will mess your shit up.

I had a bit of fun playing with capturing video as I’m trying to learn more about it. All I have learned so far is that I need to find a way to stabilize my phone better, and also that YouTube butchers the quality of videos recorded at 1080p resolution after they are uploaded. I’ll need to do a bit more experimenting, but it’s fun to try and push your skills into a new area.

I stopped for a perfunctory selfie, too. Sometimes on a shoot I ask myself what would Ray be doing if he was out shooting on a day like today. The answer to that is selfies, so I took one. It was not without incident.

I rounded a curve and was taking a picture of the Strathmore Municipal Building when I suddenly felt a bit, well, naked. I had bonked my camera around a bit while trying to get a selfie with my phone and somehow knocked my lens hood off without realizing it. I realized at that same moment I had somehow lost a lens cap too, something I’m good at (why let Weather Network get all the credit for consistency?).

A few minutes of backtracking turned up the rogue lens hood. I never figured out where the lens cap landed. It’s a good thing I have a large stash of counterfeit Canon lens caps from China that look and feel like the real thing, but for only about $0.30 apiece. No way I’m paying $5.00 each at the rate I lose these damn things. Communism for the win, there.

The snow was starting to taper off and my get up and go had got up and left about ten minutes before. I was suddenly so exhausted I wasn’t sure if I’d make it all the way back to my house. I hate how that happens. It reminds me of an old Datsun I owned when I was younger. You’d have 1/4 of a tank and be thinking you’re okay and then you blink and you’re riding empty. That’s what the flu does to me.

I crawled back in the door of my home, squared away my gear, and went to dump the pixels off my memory card. Well, crap. I had forgotten to stick a Micro-SD to CF card adapter in the camera when I swapped it, but that was not a huge thing because I keep a couple of spare 32 GB CF cards in that bag. No, the problem was that it’s been so long since I have used a CF card reader that I don’t know where the three I own got to, so this post is coming at you a day later using CF card reader number four, thanks to Amazon overnight delivery. Ah, well. Never hurts to have a spare, huh.

Images courtesy of my venerable Canon EOS 50D, Canon 17-85mm EFS IS USM f4-5.6 shortback lens, and CF card reader number four. Still, I got a real camera out of the bag and used it, so, progress!