We went to the South Coast Botanic Gardens yesterday and enjoyed the annual Southern California Orchid Society’s Orchid show and sale. This was the first place winner in one of several categories of competition.

In a few days, I am getting a brand-new Canon Digital Rebel XTi camera. My current camera, a Digital Rebel 300D, is still a great camera and takes beautiful pictures. I’m not exactly going to retire it, but likely it will be in my camera bag as a standby camera (like with a telephoto or wide-angle lens). All my old lenses will work with the new camera. The old camera can be at the ready should I need it during the next air show or vacation or whatever.

I’m so excited. I’ll be here on Monday.

Here is an excerpt from a review at Digital Photography Review:

Almost exactly three years since Canon changed the digital SLR market forever (with the $1,000 EOS 300D) they announced the third generation of their affordable entry level series, the EOS 400D (Digital Rebel XTi). This new camera follows the design of the EOS 350D, being very compact and relatively lightweight but not compromising on manual controls or in-use performance. The headline changes are another two megapixel step up (to ten megapixels), the nine-point AF sensor from the EOS 30D, a new dust removal system which includes anti-static surface coatings, low-pass filter vibration and software based dust pattern removal. Less important but just as noticeable are the removal of the status LCD, replaced instead by a camera settings screen on the now larger 2.5″ LCD monitor and the eye proximity sensor just below the viewfinder to turn this off when composing your shot.

Well, maybe not. It would have been far better for her name to pop up on a Ford, GM or Chrysler product.

As of this writing, I can not recall seeing one of these on the road. But I’ll be looking . . .

Asian lilies are noted for large flowers, vigorous growth, and sweet perfume, ‘Casa Blanca,’ an Asian Lily variety, is a standout among them. The huge flowers are pure, gleaming white and delicately flocked in a way that adds richness and texture. When these lilies are in our vase, we find excuses to wander nearby. Click on the thumbnail image to see the full-sized flower.

Saturday, during our visit to the cliffs at Point Vicente, we saw this flight of California Brown Pelicans soaring along the shoreline in the updrafts.

The four lead pelicans are seen in the image below. You can see the entire flight of ten by clicking on the image. See this article for a close up of a California Brown.

The eleventh bird in the large picture is a seagull who was also soaring the cliffs.

When we go to the range to practice, we generally share a target. We use one for the revolvers and generally change it out when we switch to the 9mm pistols. Most of the time when a target gets perforated to the point of not being able to see where the rounds are going, we will paste on one of those fluorescent glows-where-you-hit-it targets. For shotguns, we put up 2 x 3 foot silhouette targets.

Although we generally know who is hitting where on the target, there is some ambiguity. At the end of the video here you will see that even though there are shots all over the target, we are collectively getting pretty good at hitting the center a lot of the time.