I’m going to collect a few short bits a pieces together in one post this morning:

Email problem? – I just discovered that there may have been a problem with my email account during December. Please accept my apology if you sent me a message at dan@gdanmitchell.com and received no reply. I believe that the problem has been fixed, and I have set up a secondary email at gdanmitchell@gmail.com.

Current photos – December is one of my favorite times of the year in the Central California oak grassland hills. The current photographs of oak trees were made during the past month or so, and are part of a project that should eventually lead to a portfolio of black and white photographs of these oaks.

Seattle – I was able to spend a few (cold and damp) days in the Pacific Northwest during the first week of the new year. Photographs from that trip will not appear here until the end of January and first week of February. (You can preview some of them here, here, and here.)

Google ads – I’m experimenting with some small Google ads on this site. We’ll see how it goes – perhaps I’ll make enough to cover the hosting costs!

Declining memory prices are hardly headline news, but these prices are quite interesting: under $43 for 8GB CF cards and under $69 for 16GB (!) CF cards. (Does anyone know if I can even use a 16GB compactflash card in my 5D?)

Every so often someone opines that moving to a higher MP count camera doesn’t make sense, asking “how will you afford the memory to handle those giant files?” The answer is that the memory gets cheaper and cheaper all the time. Hard drive prices have dropped a lot recently, and 500GB drives are now regularly available for around $100. I haven’t done the math to prove it, but I have a hunch that the cost of storing one image from a 16MP DSLR is now probably less than what we paid to store a single image from a 4MP camera a few years ago.