Test Driving the Optical Zoom...

...and the image stabilization mechanism. The latter is truly cool. If your subjects weave and bob in the little viewing screen as mine do, you'll love IS. Zoomed in on the wind vane (above), which was spinning around and didn't realize that the camera stopped it til I got home and down loaded. Ditto for the mountain scenes below.

Here's a comparison of the standard lens position and the full optical zoom (12x) -- Badger or P-Mountain, as seen from my roof. In the picture above, you can barely make out the "P"; I'll grant it is a better picture, however. The mountain is about 3-1/2 to 4 miles away. Lo and behold there is a road up the side of that mountain I'd never seen before (below) plus a cell phone tower installation.

The Prescott Resort/Casino on the local Yavapai Indian rez about 2-1/2 miles away, as seen from the house; it is on a hilltop the other side of town.

Forsythia in the middle of an oak jungle. Neat the way the long lens compressed the perspective. I'm bearing in mind that my husband's best flower shots were all taken with telephoto lenses.

And finally -- a bird shot that could have been good if only 1) the towhee had lifted his head, 2) that piece of grass that is barely visible as a blur hadn't been there and 3) the camera had been set to record a 6 megapixel image instead of 2. Distance to the bird, about 15-18 feet. But, wow -- I'm lucky to have got this close to any bird at all! The critter is called a rufous-sided towhee; we always called them rummages because the field guide said that they rummaged among the leaves for their food.

Other comments on the camera after two days: the glass is not the equal to a good SLR telephoto -- a color fringe shows up on close inspection when you take extreme telephoto shots up to 8x10 size. But then, this is a light-weight point-and-shoot compromise that I think I'll find very satisfying.

Mountain Monograms

Bingo! Wish I could take credit for that phrase, but I came across it when consulting with The Google on the subject of just why all those letters on mountainsides near Western towns. Such as Prescott. And Jerome. And Coolidge. And Tempe. Among many others, apparently.

I discovered a fascinating web site called Deuce of Clubs; Doc, who maintains the site was asked "how come?" His answer, "I do not know that answer. I would like to know it. Having grown up in a tiny desert town with a C on the mountain, I'd accepted it as normal behavior to put town initials on mountains. Can someone really smart tell me how this behavior started?" My early experience was pretty much the same -- when the family went on a road trip, I always anticipated the initial on the mountainside at each little Arizona town.

Doc may have been talking about Coolidge (above) or Tempe, where the ASU "A" regularly gets a repaint job (below). Both pictures from the Monogram Mountains site.

However, go visit Doc to see Western mountain monograms from A to Z. And to read the full explanation -- by a professor, yet. It appears that "The 'Big C,' constructed on the Berkeley Hills by students of the University of California in 1905, seems to be the first of all the hillside letters in the West. It still occupies a commanding site overlooking the San Francisco Bay area, but eucalyptus trees now obscure it from all but direct view."

Writing in 1986 in a journal called "Landscape," James J. Parsons also noted:

"Hillside symbols have a surprisingly respectable history dating back some eighty years. To a remarkable extent the letters can be traced to a single decade, 1905-1915. They have almost always been built and maintained by college or high-school student groups. The earliest letter-building projects were devices for defusing increasingly violent inter-class rivalries, which college administrators and faculty found difficult to control. It apparently worked. Making a letter was often a gala community event, an organized "men's workday" declared a formal school holiday, with picnic lunch and supper provided by campus women."

So there you have it. Our own "P" is a legit part of the package, according to the arrangement that might give/lease or sell Badger Mountain to the city or some other conservation group.