You're beating a dead horse with that particular shtick I think.

True. After forty years of living here. One must evolve. One must start thinking like a native. Natives don't know about other places with different weather and they don't make themselves into an ass about it. Well, that's not true, but time, maybe, for me to get along to getting along.

I made snarky comments yesterday about my digital picture frame. I remember buying it and loading it with pictures at least one life ago. It wasn't altogether easy to load and I didn't like the neon sign aspects, my pictures on display or not. But I'd moved it to a more visible location last night and turned it on for the first time in, again, years. Every now and then, walking by, I'd look at it and think, I remember that photograph. Too small for the frame, but nice. So I tracked down the manufacturer and downloaded the latest software.

They've made it much easier to put together a slide show, setting a time for each image to display up to eighty in a set. Just drag and drop. It has audio, camera and TV outputs among others (this was a fancy model for the time), none of which I'll ever use, but it's blinking away behind me right now with a set of photographs taken these last few months. So I take my snarky comment back. Still isn't worth it (to me) for the money involved (bought when I was gainfully employed), but something high tech for the holidays is, well, nice. Again. After many years.

You'll be tired to death with it in a week.

I suspect.

I played a little last night with a wide angle lens on the D3s, using an ISO of 6,400 and 12,800 to shoot a couple of pictures of the living room. I'll do more later at 102,400 to see what they're talking about. The color isn't bad, the noise is quite good (not a problem for smaller pictures this size and at these web resolutions). No rush. But again, nice color, lots of latitude in jacking up the shadows on the RAW file screen before moving it into PhotoShop. Anyway, it shoots a decent picture at night in low level light. An advantage for this old fart shooting, as is often his habit, in bars over Guinness. Of course I'll eventually compare it to the D3, using one lens and such under the same conditions. Eventually. When I get around to it. To see.

There was a time you'd have done this comparison within twenty seconds of receiving it.

I never said there weren't advantages to this growing older bit. New toys are still new toys, but there's no reason to jump up and down and shout to the roof tops. Or roof beams. If I had any roof beams. We are an old hippie here. A bonafide once member of the freak brigade. We still pretend at cool and don't jump up and down unless our social security check is late. Not because we can't jump up and down, you understand, it's just the meds keep us in check. The meds and the voices. Sometimes it's hard to tell which are the worse.

There's another dead horse you could afford to skip.

Lose the “voices”? How long have we been hanging out?

Later. A walk down to the post office to mail the camera insurance update. I bet you thought I'd put it off for the full thirty days, didn't you?

Not when it comes to the cameras. You seem anal about that.

Maybe so. A walk then farther down to the morning café for a cup of coffee and feed the pigeons. A photograph or two to see if I could capture the sun and the clouds with the D2Xs, realizing, when I dropped the images into PhotoShop that a major difference with the newer cameras might be their ability to capture a really broad range of light in the RAW images they produce. There just wasn't much there when I looked at the images taken this morning with the D2Xs, thinking about last night and what I found in the images I'd taken with the newer D3s in the apartment. That's a big deal. Actually.

We are still trying to justify our purchase?

Yeah, maybe. Parts of it. Actually no. We've moved beyond that if there ever really was a that. It would be stupid, at this late date, the thing in hand. Still, that is a major difference they don't really explain or I didn't understand in the reviews. They talk about something they call Active D-Lighting and I've played with that, but, well, we'll see. I will try some shots outside with the sun and the clouds using the new camera with this in mind.

Everyone not a camera bug is asleep by now and half of those have left.

Hell, I'm half asleep even with ten hours last night. The walk was fine in the sense I wasn't tired as such, I'd have had to walk for a couple of hours for that, but the head was noticeably queasy, albeit clear, the sinuses doing their thing, and, well, we'll just call it a morning if not a day and play around here cleaning up. Playing is better than working if it does the trick.