I’m in Brookline, Massachusetts for a week, and yesterday we went up to Lynn to see my daughter, her husband, and the two grandchildren. Normally at the end of December Lynn would be deep in snow, but yesterday the temperature reached 64F, and when we arrived the kids were playing in the yard. I took lots of pictures (posted here) as well as some nice video clips.

In the evening, Merry and I went for a walk by the Leverett Pond. I had brought my camera, but the light was failing and there seemed to be nothing much worth capturing. And then Merry saw a flash of white in the reeds: a heron. I tried full optical zoom (10x) on my Panasonic Lumix, but it was still rather small. I had always been told that electronic zoom wasn’t worth using, but I decided to try the “E-Zoom” feature to get up to 15.9x. I was impressed with how well the image stabilization worked at that level. You can see the results starting here. In the final shot the heron is actually taking off, which it was hard to capture with a 1/15 sec. exposure!