The jokey cabin safety routine that Southwest Airlines is known for always sounds like it is being delivered by a very fey, gay man, regardless of the gender of the announcer. I find it a bit tiresome myself, but then camp has never been my style. I also detest the lineup for a seat. I am a white knuckle flyer when it comes to turbulence, so I always plan for a seat over the wing, the most stable location on an aircraft. It’s potluck if I will succeed with Southwest.
Now that I am home I am in that marvelous in-between space that jet lag offers, in neither and both places at once. Seasonally it was a strange journey, from full spring in Seattle to early spring in the Northeast to late winter in Chicago, and now early summer in Seattle. The landscape is lush and fully leafed out now, the tulips are about spent and the bearded irises are in their full bloom.
I birded Wooded Isle along Hyde Park’s lakefront this morning. Migrants were not much in evidence yet, it is still early in the season. The swallows have not even arrived yet. There was one of the empidonax flycatchers singing from a tree (if I knew the songs I could tell you which one), and a few yellow-rumps, but not much else for passerines except the chickadees and robins. The best bird I got though was a Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher. At first glimpse I thought it to be a kinglet, but it flitted very un-kinglet-like, more in a hurry. Then I saw the longish tail and the light outer tail feathers and it registered. I hadn’t seen this bird in years.
To change the subject—a geek thing with the Canon 20D. I caught a design flaw that could get people in trouble if they’re not paying attention. I use the mirror lockup function frequently when I am on tripod at slow shutter speeds. The point is to minimize vibration, which is most significant at speeds between about an eighth of a second to a second or two (longer than that the mirror vibration is an insignificant proportion of the exposure duration). I also use the self-timer with this function. I press the shutter, the mirror flips, there’s a 2 second delay, and the shutter fires. My hand is not on the camera, and the vibration from the mirror flap is spent.
The place you access this selection is in the Custom Functions menu item. It is immediately adjacent to the Format Card menu item, one click of the wheel. I meant to lock up the mirror, and instead found myself facing a Format Card dialog. Had I not been alert I could easily have wiped out the entire morning’s shooting. I backed out of the dialog box carefully, as if there was a loaded gun involved.
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