Well, so much for my brief streak of weekly posts. I guess it was inevitable I wouldn’t be able to keep it up as things got busy approaching the holidays. Hopefully I’ll be able to resume a bit more of a regular schedule in 2012.

Footbridge New Hampshire, August 2011

Another shot from my ill-fated Panasonic, before it met its untimely end tumbling down a rocky path…

Parapet Brook New Hampshire, August 2011

I suppose "ill-fated" is probably a little overdramatic. I had that camera for something like 6 years, and I got some pictures I really like out of it. That’s not a bad run for a digital camera, especially considering some of the conditions I hauled that one through.

Regarding the photo itself, I was continually surprised at the amount of water we encountered in the Presidentials. We had to cross countless streams like this pouring down the sides of the mountains, and there were even a few small lakes up above the treeline. I expect to see that out West, where there are glaciers that melt all summer to feed the lakes and streams, but not in the lower mountains out East. With the difficulty we ran into hiking out there in relatively dry August, I can’t even imagine climbing those mountains in the spring with snowmelt and rain.

I’m finally starting to get through the photos from my backpacking trip to the White Mountains in New Hampshire a couple months ago.  Unfortunately the trip turned out to be a bit of a bust photographically.  Backpacking and photography are slightly awkward bedfellows on the best of trips, but in this case the trails were rough enough that there wasn’t a ton of time or energy left over to take pictures.  And it didn’t help that I dropped my camera on the second day and it stopped focusing correctly.

White Mountains New Hampshire, August 2011

Fortunately it wasn’t my bigger, newer camera, it was the little Panasonic I carry in a chest pouch when I hike.  Still, it was pretty disappointing.  Not only is the other camera more work to get out and get set up (which cut down on the number of photos I shot during the trip), I’ve always been fond of the Panasonic’s native “widescreen” format which encouraged me to experiment with shots like the one above.  I haven’t inquired with Panasonic yet to see how much repairs would cost, but I suspect they’ll be expensive enough that the money would be better put toward a new camera.  So it goes with modern technology…