Sunset – December 26th

Happy Boxing Day, y’all!

About an hour before sunset today I was leaving the Red Cross Donation Center and found these clouds had moved in, the leading edge of the storm that’s supposed to bring us our first significant rain of the season tomorrow through Monday. It’s gorgeous! I love this picture! And it’s got different trees silhouetted than the ones you’ve seen a gazillion times from our front yard!

(I have vision of doing something historic and world changing such as discovering the FTL Warp Drive and then having a line of folks forever coming up the hill to stand in the front yard and looking at these power lines and palm trees like some kind of shrine. The power lines would have to be declared historical monuments so they couldn’t be torn down when everyone had their individual home fusion reactors in the garage right next to their flying cars…)

With the storm coming and all of those clouds, I knew we weren’t seeing Jupiter and Saturn tonight (and I was 100% correct!) but I was hoping for a spectacular sunset.

I wasn’t disappointed.

The only downside to the evening was due to my own stupidity. But, a lesson learned.

With all of that detail in those clouds I had also grabbed the camera with the telephoto lens and shot dozens and dozens of spectacular pictures. I saw them popping up on the display as I took them, checking the deep oranges against a patch of almost painful blue off on the horizon.

Did anyone else know that one of the older Canon Digital Rebel XT cameras will act like it’s taking pictures with no error messages or warnings, even if there’s no memory card in the camera, sending them off into the ether as they’re taken, not recording them anywhere at all?

Neither did I.

Turns out there’s a menu setting which will turn that off. It’s default is “on” because… Who knows? I’ve just looked through the entire user manuals for both the Rebel Xt and the Xti and all I see is how to turn this “feature” off, not why it exists to begin with. I don’t see any mention of any way to attach an external or other drive to store images on instead of a CF card. It is somewhat humorous (emphasis on “somewhat”) that instructions for turning this “feature” off are found in the “Handy Features” section of the manual. (Ya think??!!) Maybe there’s a professional photographer out there who can enlighten me.