Austin selected as the "Best City in the USA in Which to Live" for the second year in a row by U.S. News and World Reports Magazine (And website). It's the blue skies, I think.

When I first moved here to go to school at UT you could get a decent apartment for about $85 a month and the cost of living was nearly the lowest in the state. You could not get a freshly baked croissant but you could find decent biscuits just about anywhere. The town was small enough and compact enough that most students didn't see the need to own a car. In fact, it was so cheap in the early 1970's that my parents could afford to have three kids at the University at the same time; including graduate school. And with fifty cent Shiner Bock beer in bottles and $7 ticket prices at the Armadillo World Headquarters (famous music hall) it was very cost effective to take a date to see the Talking Heads open for the B-52's. Or was it the other way around? And yes! we generally walked there.

All that has changed. You can get croissants pretty much anywhere in Austin but sadly now McDonalds arguably has the best biscuits in town. You need a car if you live and work anywhere outside of downtown, and it better be a comfortable car because the same magazine article points to traffic and road congestion as one of the few big cons of living here. I'll list another big con: the price of housing has been sky rocketing for years. 

We have the mixed benefit of living in a very nice neighborhood in the middle of the school district that just got named (again, and for decades running) as the best overall school district in Texas. Usually in the top 50 school districts in the USA. Demand to get kids into one of these top flight schools is red hot which means that we're deep into "tear down" territory (buying and tearing down an existing house to build a bigger, better one on the lot). People are moving here in droves from the west coast and they don't even blink at the thought of paying a million dollars for a basic 3 bedroom, two bathroom ranch style house just to tear it down and use the lot as the foundation for their new, multi-miillion dollar dream ranch style homes. There are currently five or six houses heading that way just on our block.

We are actually starting to think of selling our house and moving somewhere else. But we'll probably be overcome with nostalgia and laziness and just hunker down and wait until we're 65 and can lock in the homestead tax exemption....

I think the biggest attractions of Austin, beside the circus we call the State Legislature, are the beautiful blue skies, the great Tex-Mex food, and the fact that you can still paddle board right through downtown... 

If you decide to move here just remember to bring a big bucket of cash. Home prices continue to rise and, sadly, so do the property taxes...

Infinite growth. Like bacteria in a Petri dish...

Gone boating. Now becoming nostalgic for a clean, low mileage Nikon D300S.

All images: West Palm Beach. Nikon D300 + 18-200mm. 

I provided photographic coverage for an executive retreat for Freescale Semiconductor in 2008. We ended up at the Breakers Hotel in West Palm Beach. The accommodations were lovely. During part of the event, I guess to blow off steam generated by days of arguing and debating over corporate strategy, someone arranged for everyone to go out fishing. I'm not sure why as most of the participants were not big fishermen and most came back to the dock, hours later, with varying degrees of seasickness. 

When I found this folder of images I was reminded that the two cameras I used during that week long event were the original Nikon D300's, Not the D300Ss. The lens I used the most was the Nikon 18-200mm which was more or less the state-of-the-art for image stabilization at the time. It promised (and generally delivered) about four stops of stabilization ---- mostly useful for objects that don't move around a lot). 

I also brought along an 85mm f1.4, a 35mm f1.4 and a 20mm f2.8 for all the work that I had to cover in a sometimes dim conference room. 

Reviewing the shots this afternoon; and running a handful of them through the latest raw converter, reminding me that we already knew what we were doing with digital cameras back then and that the D300 was a damn fine photographic instrument. My interiors and exteriors evoke photography just the way I always thought it should be. I was also reminded that the cameras had great battery life and comfortable handling. 

I made the (ill advised?) switch into the Canon system by the time the upgrade, the 300"S" came out so I never got to compare the cameras directly but I knew the general themes. The newer camera offered remedial video, a much faster and larger buffer and an HDMI out for monitoring. I've been told by various sources that the imaging quality was either "the same" or "much better" on the newer model,  depending on who you wanted to listen to....

What you essentially were offered in the final D300S was a 3 inch LCD finder, a very, very robust camera body, an imaging sensor that was much better at higher ISOs than the previous "flagship" body, the D2XS, a lighter package, card slots for SD and CF (and the CF upgraded to UDMA for much faster read/write speeds) at about a third the price of the earlier D2XS or the D3 that came along around the same time. In many ways the D300S was the APS-C version of the D3 series!

I found one (300S) a couple days ago at Precision Camera. It's cosmetically near perfect and has about 25k shutter actuations on it. I asked them to put it on hold yesterday but got busy today with more family administration stuff. If it's still there tomorrow I'm thinking of picking it up for the princely sum of >$300. That is, unless you guys know some deep dark secret about this model and you're quick to talk me out of it. 

On another topic: It seems chic to be personally confessional these days on photography blogs. I note that MJ has published an essay mentioning his use of online dating services. Lloyd Chambers has gone into amazing detail about the aftermath of his concussion.  I'm joining the party! No. I'm not using dating services, and I'm not a bike rider; just sharing a bit of personal information. To wit, B. and I are celebrating our 33 wedding anniversary tomorrow. Yes, Friday the 13th. Odd omen, for sure. 

Since my wife and I worked together and dated for five years before taking the matrimonial plunge this means we've been getting along (pretty damn well, considering my idiosyncrasies) for a whopping 38 years. We'll have a quiet celebration and then get back to work...