New site, new camera!!

There's a new flying site opening up in the area - BobS has purchased the site of the 1998(?) HG World Championships out near Gundowring. It's an afternoon site, and should take a NW-SW, which fills a large gap as none of the other local sites will take W-NW.
I've been out there several times now - flown off it on two different days - and am looking forward to exploring the potential of this new area!

Also, I have a new camera!! My faithful Kodak DX7590 has taken over 16,000 pics, has dust on the sensor, and I've noticed a degradation in picture clarity in recent months. The strengths of the Kodak were it's GREAT lens and ideal size for operating with one hand while flying - it's weakness was the overly aggressive jpeg compression. It's been taking more and more work to clean up the pics and I finally found what looks to be a good replacement. Enter the Ricoh GX200, which sounds like it's special features may work out perfectly for paragliding pics. The main selling points for me were the wide-angle lens (24mm equivalent), ability to take RAW images (speeding up in this area is the significant difference between the GX200 and the GX100), faster frame-rate for video's (30fps should be better than the DX7590's 12 fps), and higher resolution (the GX200 has a 12MP sensor, but as it's still quite small I'm expecting lots of noise in anything but good lighting - which I'll be in most of the time :).
I've ordered with it a remote shutter switch and lens hood (will put a UV, polaroid, or maybe sky filter on this - which should also keep dust from getting blown into it's guts), so there should be lots of fun experimenting. Although this is a pocket-sized camera it has more functionality/programability than some DSLR's so it'll be interesting to see how easy it is to use.
UPDATE: I've picked it up from the shop - looks nice - and the guy I ordered it from swung some sort of deal with his suppliers and got (no price increase) the external viewfinder model (I wasn't going to order that, $120 more expensive for a feature I don't think I'll use much) and a 19mm equivalent wide-angle lens!! Now that's why you buy from the small local businesses - you just don't get that quality of service from the big places or when buying over the net. Thanks Wodonga Photographics, I'll be back for more gear in the future, no doubt.

While I'm talking about new things, I downloaded a freebee photo-stitching program (called autostitch) which I'm really happy with - it's small, fast and easy to use but has lost of controllability, and does a great job. Here's a panorama that it stitched together from six or seven pics I took while flying above Gundowring.

There's a bigger version in my web album here.