I haven't been doing much updating of the blog lately, but there has been news; I just haven't had the time to write about it.

We moved out of Socorro last month. The new house is bigger internally but we have no outside storage space, so I'm still trying to figure out what to do with tools and other things. The house has a woodstove, and I've been getting lots of salt cedar from near the Rio Grande. I'm hoping our heating bills will decrease. Propane is nearly $3 a gallon now (it was about $1 the last time I checked).

I recently added a Nikon F4 film camera to my collection, primarily because it lets me use some of Nikon's oldest lenses as well as the newest (except for VR) on the same camera. As expected it does exhibit vignetting with my one DX lens, the 18-55, but all I have to do to avoid that is not use the lens at 18mm; keeping it no wider than 22 or 23 mm prevents vignetting altogether. G lenses do indeed work as long as I use the camera in program or shutter-priority mode. I'm looking forward to getting some non-AI lenses—which are relatively cheap these days because they can't be used on digitals—from eBay and yard sales. One of my goals also is to start shooting slide film and using a projector.

I just returned from two days in Playas. I succeeded in installing an Exchange server (client access/hub transport/mailbox roles), which should alleviate many of the speed problems Playas has been experiencing between there and here. I also got Backup Exec installed, though we still don't have a SCSI card for the backup server (or, really, a dedicated backup server, for that matter). Currently Backup Exec is doing disk-to-disk backups to a network share, which is convoluted but works okay. It's noticeably slower than tape backup, though.

I got up early yesterday morning in Playas and spent about a half-hour outside, with the F4 on a tripod (loaded with Fuji Provia 100) and mounted with the 18-55, and holding the D70s with the 70-300. I waited until sunrise to shoot some of the slide film, but took all kinds of pictures of the surrounding mountains with the D70s. They were covered with snow from the previous day, though there was none remaining in Playas itself. A handful of the digital shots are quite good, especially after doing level / brightness / contrast adjustment in GIMP. I find I share Ken Rockwell's taste in saturated colors, so I end up compressing the dynamic range on most of my good shots and then decreasing the brightness while increasing the contrast slightly. This makes an image really "pop". It doesn't necessarily result in "reality," exactly, but that's not what I'm going for.