A typical Ashland scene this time of year…

Notice the California plates. I guess I can’t complain without being a hypocrite given that I feel in love with Ashland on a tourist visit from California myself.

Posted on June 29th, 2009 under lithia park, only in ashland. Tags: funky cars, lithia park, summer. Comments: None

I was playing around with the modes on my LX3 on my bike ride the other day around Lithia Park. By flipping the switch to SCN and then choosing “Hi Speed Burst” I was able to take six pictures per second. You lose a lot of quality in so doing, but the pictures aren’t bad if you are in good lighting and close to your target. In this series I wasn’t close enough.

Check out the fun you can have with putting these pictures together backwards with a program like Windows Movie Maker.

Reverse motion movie

Posted on June 23rd, 2009 under lithia park, only in ashland, people. Tags: lithia park, lx3, people, video, water. Comments: 1

On the side of Lithia Park away from the plaza there exists a swimming reservoir that mostly just locals know about. The water is extremely cold, but it’s a nice place on a hot day. Nude sunbathers are out on occasion too.

I took this picture about a month ago when no one was there. Last time I rode by, on a warmer day, there were kids swinging on a rope into the water. That would have made for a better picture, but I didn’t have my camera with me.

Posted on April 25th, 2009 under lithia park, only in ashland, places. Tags: lithia park, spring, water. Comments: 3

I headed into Lithia Park to try my first pictures shooting in RAW. The above isn’t one of them. I took the same picture in RAW and could not get it to look anywhere near as good as this. I took a bunch of others in both JPEG and RAW mode too. Same result. All look far better in non-RAW mode. The processing of the RAW images is a huge hassle too. Just to load one takes a few minutes and then the manipulation can take pretty much as long as you want to spend on it.

Some people don’t shoot in RAW because it takes a few seconds to save it to the memory card (as the RAW files are huge). That isn’t a problem with the LX3. In fact, I think you can take something like four or five pictures a second even in RAW mode. But my initial experiment in RAW will not likely have me using it again anytime soon.

This photo is of Ashland Creek in Lithia Park. The little kid’s playground is just off to the left.

Posted on March 12th, 2009 under lithia park, nature. Tags: lithia park, lx3, trees, water. Comments: 5