Hot Pixies

Er, I mean hot pixels. As in, my 7 year old camera is really in need of replacement. Apparently I have a lot more hot pixels than I used to, as evidenced by my recent long-exposure photos of a storm (yesterday evening we had QUITE the lightning show to the east.) I went through and touched up the photo to the right, but it took some doing. It was cropped, too, so I didn't have to touch up every hot pixel. I like having a camera that I can just turn on and shoot with, and know that every shot is print-ready without having to digitally edit. And though it still takes awesome photos, I feel like it's about time to upgrade. So now I'm sort of (passively) camera-shopping (dreaming) for the next big thing. Even though I am still learning to use this one. Yesterday, for instance, I finally figured out how to manually set the exposure time. Imagine that! This one was a 15 second exposure, on a wobbly compact tripod, with the wind gusting to 15mph at the least. One of a hundred shots I took last night. I'm stoked. Quite a few had impressive lightning strikes. All had really cool clouds. I love how, in this shot, you can see the glow from the right where the street lamp was really messing with my shots. I couldn't get quite the best part of the storms in frame because of that damn lamp. It really screws up our front yard stargazing, too. Didn't we move out to the boonies to get away from street lamps and light pollution? Well, didn't we? ;)