Giving Me a Camera on My Bike is Dangerous

For quite some time, I've had one of those older cell phones, you know the kind without a camera, or any other bells and whistles. No bluetooth, no downloaded ring tones, no games. My kids think my cell phone, as compared to those of their friends' parents is "old tech". Well, it happened. I finally dropped it one too many times (not a few of them have been from my bike, while I was riding) and it stopped working very well. So I braved the mall this week (no small task due to the fact that A) it was Christmas week, and B) I hate malls) and got myself a new phone. And this one has a camera.

Now I'm a photography nut, in case you hadn't noticed by the fact that I'm usually including only barely relevant photographs with my blog entries. But I've been hampered by the fact that I don't really have a camera that I can take with me all the time. Both of my digitals are way too big to carry in a pocket, and I've never bought a small point-n-shooter, most likely out of the kind of camera snobbery that comes when you get a degree in Art. I cut my teeth in a black and white darkroom, after all.

But now, I have a camera in my phone, on hand at all times. The time I think I'll really enjoy it is on my bike. There have been so many times I've wished to capture the things I've seen from my saddle. There was the time I came around a corner on a foggy autumn day to find an old airplane in someone's yard, wings rising out of the mist like it was floating in mid-flight. Or the small fawn by the side of the road, recently dispatched in an encounter with a car. But it had fallen in such a way that the leaves behind it made a perfect set of angels wings. All of these images are stored in my head, and nowhere else. But now I'm truly dangerous for I have my phone.

Today's rainbow is from an hour's ride out into the countryside behind the hill that our house is on. It was unseasonably warm (I rode in shorts, in December!), but half of the sky was clouded with rain while the other side was all blue sky. This rainbow split the difference, and was far more vivid than my tiny phone camera could ever capture. But still, I'm glad to be able to save at least a small fascimile of the beautiful ride I had today.