October 07, 2006
Stupid Brown Bear
While we were fishing at the mouth of where the Kenai River runs into Skilak Lake I had problems with one of my compact flash cards. The camera had a message saying CF Error, and I wasn't able to do anything with the disk. So I changed it out and kept on taking shots, but I was disappointed that it had a problem and I was worried that I would not recover the photos. The particular photos that I was worried about were the ones I took of the brown bear and several nice rainbow trout photos. I was able to recover them last night with much less effort than I had anticipated. I usually load photos onto my computer by plugging in my memory reader (one that reads 22 types of memory) and then plugging in the compact flash card. Then iPhoto launches and I click one button to upload my photos into iPhoto. Bang Bang Bang. With the bad flash card this process didn't work. So my next option was to get onto a Windows machine and try to import the photos into Picassa. That actually worked, which is not something that I expected. So now I present to you a photo of the brown bear swimming across the Kenai River toward us. I was the first one to spot it on the river bank and immediately traded my fishing pole for my camera with its 70 mm - 200 mm lens. This photo was shot at full extension (200 mm * 1.6 conversion factor) of 320 mm. The bear never did make it over to us (luckily for the bear because each and every one of us had a gun) and instead it got to swim through some rapids and out into Skilak Lake.