Cherry Parfait

Bruce sent me a video this morning that really helped get me out of my depression over our government. The video is called The Jive Aces present: Bring Me Sunshine and you can see it at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXvJ8UquYoo&feature=player_embedded.

I am renting a new 70-200mm f/2.0 lens for a week to try it out. So far it's wonderful. All the photos, except the ones of the lens on my camera, were taken with the new lens. I got a lot of photos already, but couldn't get all of them posted because the upload speed on our Internet is running at a max of 2.7 KB/s, so files that usually take seconds to upload are taking minutes. Laurie was trying to send a large PDF to her students and it kept timing out. I hope Qwest gets it fixed by tomorrow.

Even though the new lens is huge and heavy, it's so fast that I can get clear photos hand held, under low light conditions. The photo of Puck and Rosencrantz sitting in the window looking out is hand held at f/2.0 at 1/15 of a second. The photo is very sharp, and I'm very impressed with the lens.

While I was lifting weights, I saw Puck jump straight up in the air in my peripheral vision, looked over and saw a snake striking at him. I ran out of the catio to find a fairly large garter snake protecting itself from the cats. I gathered up a couple of the cats, ran in with them, grabbed my camera with the new lens, ran back out and photographed the snake. Then I picked up the snake, showed it to Laurie and released it in an area where it had plenty of cover from the cats.

The light was a little better on the purple and blue iris tonight. The colors are much closer to what we see in tonight's photo, taken with the new lens, but I thinks it's more because of the light that the lens.