Biltmore Estate

For my birthday Thursday, Nina and I spent a couple of hours roaming Biltmore Estate during its spring flower display, then saw "The Grand Budapest Hotel" (outstanding in every way), and had dinner at my favorite pizza place. Lovely day.

It was my first chance to experiment outdoors with the new camera I bought about two months ago. It's a Sony NEX-3NL, which I snagged while Amazon briefly had it for the ridiculously low price of $298.

None of these pictures will win a National Geographic contest, but they at least show a bit of the beauty of Biltmore. They also make me think the camera was a good choice; with the camera in full auto mode, it seems to have done a nice job with focus, exposure, etc., even when I went out of my way to give it difficult situations. Color rendition looks remarkably good to me, including some tricky flower colors that my Nikon point-and-shoot could never get right (especially the purple of some of the orchids). The sharpness and detail, too, are great improvements on the Nikon.

Right-click on a photo to see larger versions, though they're still only about 2 megapixels, compared to the 16 of the originals. (Blogspot automatically shrinks pictures to its predetermined limit.)