Monthly Archives: May 2010

Health Care Town Hall and the scariest graphic of the week

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Michael Tanner, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, presented at the North Dakota Policy Council’s town hall meeting on health care last week. I’ve seen Mr. Tanner speak before and was excited to see his return. Sadly, this time around he’s talking about a health care takeover bill that’s been signed into law, not one that was a distant possibility. He did provide some insight into ways that this unconstitutional power grab could be defeated as a whole or in part.

This is the creepiest slide of his presentation, although there were others that had more specifically bad news for North Dakota. This is a diagram of the new Obamacare health care bureaucracy. Looks easy to navigate, doesn’t it? So much for making things simpler!

By the way, if you bought into the line that adding millions of extra insured people to the system was going to bring costs down, don’t forget to add in the costs of all the new unionized government employees required to staff those little colored boxes in the diagram above. Still feeling all Hopey-Changey™ about health care? I didn’t think so.

The North Dakota Policy Council represents the interests of North Dakotans in a variety of ways. By visiting policynd.org regularly you can find out about events like this one where you can ask your own questions. You can find links to videos from past events as well. You may even consider supporting the NDPC to the degree that you choose. I’m glad that they, along with folks like Mr. Tanner, are doing the research to see how all this Hope™ and Change™ is really going to affect North Dakotans.

Test Drive Thursday

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Thursday I was able to hang out with my friend Ken for a while and enjoy a brief photography trip. The cherry on top is that Ken let me test drive his new Canon 7D digital camera, the very one I hope to get later this Spring! Needless to say, I was very excited.

We set our sights on this barn north of Wilton and arrived just before the sun began to set. That gave us some pretty nice “Golden Hour” sunlight despite the clouds encroaching on the horizon.

I was absolutely blown away by the image quality of this camera. The fleeting sunlight didn’t allow me time to play around with the camera settings much except for the usual exposure, shutter speed, ISO, and aperture. I was amazed at the photos this camera was producing.

The colors and dynamic range of the 7D are phenomenal, and I was able to take low-light shots that would send my 20D packing. I love my 20D, but cameras have obviously come a long ways since 2005!

Naturally, having a photogenic test subject doesn’t hurt. Combine that with the onset of color from the imminent sunset, and you have an ideal circumstance for running a camera through its paces.

Can you tell it was shady here? Is it apparent that I used a blast from my fill flash? I didn’t think so. I was flabbergasted by the results I got here; it was a photo I didn’t think was possible, yet it came out very nicely.

I shot these in JPEG mode, not camera RAW, so there isn’t much I could do in post-processing. That means that the photos you see here have very little adjustment to them, if any. This shot was taken after the sun was going down. It had a little bit of a blue tone to it due to the shade, and I warmed it up a little. The exposure, however, does not indicate how dark and shady it was when I clicked the shutter.

On the way home we stopped to catch this windmill with a splash of color behind it. I switched the lens over to my 20D and shot this with the same settings, and none of the color appeared. The shadows were much darker as well. That’s the big difference (aside from features) between the two cameras: I can make some amazing photos with my 20D, but in many situations I have to do a lot more processing to bring out the color and detail that the camera has captured. It doesn’t hurt that I just upgraded my Photoshop!

I love my 20D and will never set it aside. Since I bought it in 2005 and started this blog a while later, Canon has released a 30D. Then a 40D. Then a 50D. Each time I looked at ’em and could not declare them a significant enough upgrade for me to spend that kind of money (which I don’t have, by the way). Then came the 7D. Now I’m ready. With a little blessing to make the money part come together, I will be expanding my digital capabilities!

The 20D will still be in my camera bag as a backup, though. I love it. It’s been faithful and trouble-free for almost 55,000 photos so far and it’s got plenty left in it.