Trying to break the sound barrier in a jet car on the salt-caked flats of the desert is not, I have discovered, a spectator sport. Craig Breedlove's machine (which extends beyond the actual vehicle and includes the goateed, heavy-metal auto intelligentsia hiving around the whole shebang) requires endless tinkering and tweaking. So after countless attempts to catch a glimpse of Breedlove's speed dream in action, my father and I called it quits. Luckily, we had all we needed for our own low-meets-high tech playa adventure: two roadhog dirt bikes circa 1985, and the DS-300, one of the latest - and hippest - digital camera offerings from Fujifilm.
If you haven't yet experienced the completely fetishistic powers of taking photos digitally, be psyched about your virgin status - the first time you slip the cool gray PC card out of the camera and into your computer, it's truly titillating. Until recently, digital cameras have been the chi-chi accessory of the uniquely loaded. Three years ago, Wired reviewed the Fujix DS-505, which would have set you back 12,780 bucks - Polaroid, anyone? But now the tech has been tricked, and Fujifilm has crafted a digital camera impressive in both specs and price. What rocks about the DS-300 is that it boasts many of the features you'd find on a more expensive model - zoom lens, flash, and manual aperture and shutter controls. Most wallet-boggling, however, is that the 2/3-inch, 1.3 million-pixel CCD photosensitive element and digital recording system is the same technology that's used in the DS-505. That equals high-resolution images with superb image quality. I was blown away by a photo my father snapped of a coyote - each of the animal's hairs and whiskers illuminated by buttery light.
Fujifilm has made the DS-300 lightweight, and that's a good thing because, frankly, I thought my father had grown a new appendage when I saw how incessantly he carried the camera around. With this affordable accoutrement tucked snugly into the buttpack, we cruised out to a nondescript drift in the middle of the cracked and demented playa. It was the kind of open space that makes your head explode - the kind you can rarely capture with a photograph. But Dad busted out the DS-300 and started popping the pics, and later that evening, as we huddled around the computer and viewed the day's panoramas, I felt the vastness all over again.
STREET CRED
Smooth in the Crud Speedpass Gas
Point and Click
