New camera! Bike ride! Warm weather!

Goodness, what a day. With Cat out of town this week, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Zach, and today we got to go out and bikeride for the first time in probably 2 weeks.

Not only was that cool, but today I received my new Olympus D770UZ camera. Astute readers will remember that about a year and a bit ago, my old camera was stolen at an event. I’ve been without a decent digital camera since then, and with work picking up now, I finally bit the bullet and bought a new one. It arrived today, and so while Zach and I were out biking, I naturally gave it a go.

The camera generates stupid-high resolution pictures (2277×1712) which would make very little sense sharing on the web, so I’ve thumbnailed and rescaled these to avoid 800k downloads beating the bejeezus out of our server.

Down the road from us is Berlin Orchards, an apple orchard we sometimes go to to pick apples. They have some fantastic trees around the fields, and I loved how this one stood out. By the way, this is less than 2 miles from our site for Mosaic, so it gives you an idea what the area is like.

The camera is small enough that I’m comfortable letting Zach handle it. I handed it to him and rode away from him and back, asking him to just keep taking pictures. This is the one that came out the best. By the way, that’s the Assabet River Rail Trail we’re on. It’s a beautiful trail as you can see, and Zach and I ride it a lot. Check out the AART inc site for pictures of the ongoing construction on it.

Quiz time. Can you figure out what this image is? I didn’t do much more than hold the camera and take the picture, but it’s a nifty keano pattern. My pattern/artist/nutso mom couldn’t figure out what it is. I’m pleased 🙂

This is an example of why I like the Olympus larger-scale lenses over the small-aperture standard digital camera lens. Because the 770UZ has a 10x zoom on it, it has a larger lens, and therefore handles long distance pictures in an elegant way, but shortening up the depth of field. This picture was actually taken from about 30′ away, with the zoom at about 80%.

These are selected from about 2 dozen pictures I took, including an MPG of Z bikeriding. The camera is fast, handy to work with, and I’m screamingly pleased with the results. The image quality is what I’ve come to expect from Olympus digcams.

Oh, and the bikeride was nice too. We rode about 6 miles in (according to happy bike computer) about 34 minutes. We stopped and fiddled with the camera a bunch, hence the slow pace, but even still, with me on a trail bike and Zach on a kids 5 speed, we move along okay.