The moon started peeking out from behind the Sandias at 8:08:32 this evening. The sun had set four minutes earlier, but the bright moon in the waning light made the exposures difficult all the same.

On my way out to the bosque tonight, I stopped to photograph an iris with my Lumix GF1 and the battery died. I ran back in a got Laurie’s Lumix FZ35, which zooms to 480mm, and headed back out to the river. It’s too bad the battery died on the GF1 because I had planned to use a 400mm lens on a tripod to photograph the moon with it tonight. The GF1 has manual settings that are easy to adjust, whereas, the FZ35 is not easy to use on manual settings.

The first photo of the moonrise is done with the FZ35 at 480mm. The photo is done hand held, but I turned off the image stabilization. I was going to put it on the tripod, but  since I rarely use that camera, I couldn’t figure out how to adjust the aperture and shutter speed on the manual settings.

The second moonrise was done using my Lumix L10 with a Leica 28mm to 100mm zoom lens. I turned off the image stabilization and hand-held the camera. I was able to expose for the moon without completely blacking out the river, bosque and mountains. The problem is everything but the moon is still underexposed, and the moon is small with the lens set at 100mm, but it is still has good detail for hand held with image stabilization turned off.

The reason I’m turning off image stabilization on my stabilized lenses is because I’m not sure it helps. I’ve always left stabilization turned on on those lenses, and should have gotten crystal clear photos, all the time, but that has not always been the case. My 40mm f1.7 lens, my macro lens, and Le Long Lens, that I rented, are not stabilized and I get very clear photos with them, even at slow shutter speeds; therefore, I’m testing turning off the image stabilization on my stabilized lenses to see how they do un-stabilized. So far so good.

I did the photo of the black ant with my macro lens. The ant looked like it was dancing or doing a touch down prance. I’m tempted to photoshop a foot ball in it’s left ant hand.

If you put down a box or a basket, a cat materializes in it instantly. We pulled down the basket we keep flour, sugar, etc, in, pulled out the flour and Stretch appeared instantly where the flour container was. I think cats have figured out Star Trek’s transporter — Rosencrantz seems to beam himself through walls.

We have a mini rose in a basket that we got from Costco last year that has very nice form. We have no Idea what it is, other than red.

The Harley was parked in front of Bed Bath and Beyond. If I get enough interesting Harley photos, I might put together a Harleys in Albuquerque book.

I did several setups and photographed them tonight. I have several clips of bullets I was given for an M-1 Garand, even though I don’t have an M-1 Garand. With all the recent politics, I’ve been thinking about doing some set ups, and finally got around to it. The first one is on a map of a world projection I drafted back in the day when cartographers still drew maps by hand. The second setup features a collection of antique cameras.

I added a menu to the side bar that allows anyone to order photos from the blog through AdoramaPix, although there will be a delay between when the photos are posted on the blog and when they are available on AdoramaPix. I upload the images as large files to AdoramaPix so they can generally be printed as large as 20X30 inches, but it takes a long time to upload because they are huge files, and we have stone age speed DSL in Corrales.

After the wind blew all night, we ended up having a very nice day today. If the wind is going to blow, I prefer it blow at night, even though it woke me up several times during the night. We got some gardening done today, cleaned the house, and then I had to make an emergency run to the store to get a new wok to cook dinner in.

Tristan came out this afternoon and prepared Thai curry from our “Fine Cooking Magazine.” Our old wok was coated and the coating was wearing off. I intended to order a think cast iron wok to replace it, but never got around to it. So when it came time for Tristan to start cooking we had a wok crises, and the only option available was for me to speed out to the store to get one. I ended up with a carbon steel wok because  it was beyond Bed Bath and Beyond’s ability to stock thin cast iron woks. I’m not really going to complain. They had the carbon steel wok and it was half the price of a the thin cast iron woks I was looking at on-line.

The dish was fantastic and Laurie made a “Glorious Sponge Cake” from the 1950 “Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book.” The cake is light, spongy and very lemony, and wonderful with fresh whipped cream.

The lead photo is a profile of a house spider that’s been hanging out on the “cat magnet” fleece blankets we have on the couch. The fleece in macro makes it look like the the spider’s on a cloud. I also included a profile of America, and macro of another fruit fly. The fruit flies are so tiny I have a hard time getting the camera to focus on them. I tried manual focus, but that made it more difficult as my movements and the fly’s movements made it impossible to keep a focus. I finally changed my camera settings to only focus on the center point of the lens and that helped.

The profile of Rosencrantz shows off his Egyptian kitty look, and the last photo is another view of the black iris.

A black iris finally bloomed. It’s purple in the back lighting, but it’s definitely black. I also included a white and yellow iris that had very nice form. There are a few iris that have survived the frosts and they will be done blooming in a week or two.

Café Giuseppe finally opened next door to our office. Currently he offers espresso, breakfast burritos and a few other breakfast and lunch type items. I think he is going to offer gelato, also, but i didn’t notice on the menu.

Fruit flies are invading now that it’s warming up. I got the one tonight on the white orchid. They are really tiny and hard to focus on in the low light, with my slow macro lens. I had to send back Le Long Lens this morning. Giuseppe’s place, the Indian jewelry store and photo of Heritage I posted this morning are the last photos taken with that lens.

Since eBlogger is still down and deleted my entry from the 11th, so now there will be two days missing from my blog, I set up a WordPress blog very quickly this morning.