Parks & Recreation: Intro

For New Years, we resolved to visit each park in the East Bay Regional Park District.  Shortly thereafter, it occurred to one of us to see how many parks were involved.  65.  Oops, that's 13 more than just barely possible.  Even discounting the ones we've already visited, we'd still have to prioritize.  Typically for me, I created a spreadsheet to keep track of salient features: dog regulations, acreage, distance, etc.  Equally typical of me, I gave up transferring data from the individual park pages to my spreadsheet after only 16 entries. 

Even accounting for several revisions to the resolution, we've done pretty well this year, visiting at least one park each weekend, aside from the one I spent in Texas for my Uncle's funeral.  Rather than relying solely on memory, I've decided to start a journal to keep track of the treks, and due to the capability of attaching images, I've decided to do it in blog form instead of written. 

I'll backtrack and write entries (at least, I hope I will) for previous trips, but for the moment I'll leave a list for a placeholder.

Parks visited prior to 2011:

• Tilden
• Wildcat Canyon
• Claremont Canyon
• Point Isabel
• Redwood
• Anthony Chabot
• East Shore State Park
• Briones
• Temescal

New (to us) this year:

• Sibley
• Las Trampas
• Diablo Foothills / Walnut Creek's Shell Ridge Open Space
• Del Valle
• Ohlone Wilderness
• Black Diamond Mines (yesterday)

 Eventually, I'd like to start putting up trail maps, or at least routes with mileage and elevation (something like Bay Area Hiker except less useful), but for now it'll mainly be a collection of personal anecdotes that only my mother will find interesting.

Lens Dithering

Trying to decide on a new lens. Took some of Allie at the lake the other day with the 24-50 f/3.3 and was pretty disappointed. Even when the lighting was ok, the focus in the right spot, it still looked soft:

A quick peek over on ebay showed the fast mid-range zoom options to be 24-85 mm f/2.8-4, 18-55 f/2.8 and the 24-70mm f/2.8. I wanted a bit more length than 55, so skipped over it, though on second though ay have to go back for a longer look. The 24-85 puzzled me, because in te detailed specs, it said tht the maximum aperature was f/2.8 at 24mm. So what about away from 24? Took a while, but eventually found that the "4" meant a maximum aperature of f/4 at 85mm. Oh. So that, along with a few amazon an flickr reviews of not being teribly sharp lost it its top spot on my list.

At some point I got side-tracked, and had to restart my search. This time I just went on mid-range zooms, and noticed the 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6 VR. I've heard all sorts of nice things about VR for low-light, which is definitely an issue at Lake Anza (forrested, and in a deep valley running North-South). The problem is, my lens-to-be needs to be able to handle action shots. So, a dilemma: go for VR, or wide aperature. Any wider than 2.8, and I need a prime lens. Fine, I've been looking at the 85mm/1.8 for a while. Then again, it may be too narrow of a view; Allie won't be that far away.

So I decided to make a (highly unscientific) test. Here's one taken with my 70-300mm f/4 VR (according to the exif data, it was actually at f/4.4 here)

Although the VR is supposed to be very helpful for panning, its real purpose is to stabilize the lens to allow for longer shutter times. Fine for low-light, but not necessarily great for action shots. Here's another one, same lens, but about an hour later, with lower light.

Actually, I'm pretty happy with this one. Although static, this was right in the instant between my throwing the ball, and her jumping for it. Here's another one, where she is visibly moving. Exposure time 1/200s. Still at 70mm f/4.4.

Her legs are burry, but that doesn't really bother me.

Then I moved on to my 50mm f/1.4. This is a beautifully sharp lens for stationary subjects

but, it's an old manual, so extremely challenging for focusing and tracking, especially when using the same hand to throw the ball.

So, it was a fairly illuminating test actually. What I really need is a fast autofocus. A bit of zoom might be nice, but for the right length I might be able to get away without it. Key, though, is the actual speed of the autofocus mechanism, on which I've done zero research, except to know that it has been measured.

And appropos of nothing, crab people: