Serpent Mounds

Yesterday's leisure time activity was a pleasant drive around Rice Lake. I forgot to bring either the "real" camera or the "real digital" camera, so all I had to take pictures was the Treo. It didn't do too bad a job, actually:

I couldn't get panoramic shots, as the combination of the fixed lens and the overwhelming sunlight just washed everything away. Here are a couple of shots taken from the shore of Serpent Mounds park, on the north shore of Rice Lake.

The first shot is actually looking a bit east of south, while the second shot is looking southwest. You can see how much difference the sun reflecting off the frozen lake blows away the camera's image.

Just after I took this picture:

. . . we thought we were about to get attacked by a local drunk, whose luau we'd interrupted. Fortunately, appearances were deceiving — the native was both friendly and informative, and no alcohol-fuelled assault was intended. I didn't venture to take his picture, however — no point in pushing our luck.

We walked a bit further east, along the shoreline to get to the sandy beach just below the mounds, and I took the opportunity to try for some artistic "nature" pictures. The down-side of using a camera with an LCD viewfinder is that it's almost utterly useless in bright sunlight, so I didn't frame all the images particularly well:

The mounds themselves are difficult to photograph effectively:

By this time, the cold wind off the lake was winning the temperature battle against the warm sunshine, so we decided that getting back to the car would be a good idea.