Played around with the nighttime presets on my Casio Z750.  A small selection of the results are posted over on flickr (trying to overcome the picture size limitations associated with MSN Spaces).

Each photo has some minimal levels tweaking to increase the contrast, and some cropping (hard to frame moving targets perfectly in the dark with 2 sec exposures).

Enjoy!

Our small end-of-the-road neighborhood (if neighborhood isn’t too grandiose a term for a few houses sharing a private road) only has one access road.  Which makes it difficult when you are preparing to leave town for the July 4th weekend and a tree is down across that road.  Even more difficult is when your chainsaw blade is simply shot, and the replacement you bought the last time you were at Home Depot only has 72 drive links instead of the 84 your saw actually requires.  But if you’re lucky and the tree is hung up on another, you might be able to sneak carefully under and trust that a hard-working neighbor will clean up the mess while you go on to visit your mom.

But then, when you return home, you might just find another tree down (a previously unobserved effect of the start of scorch season after an abnormally wet winter?)  That’s OK if the branches in question were too big and dangerous for an amateur to tackle, and you really wanted to head off quickly for firework watching anyway.  Who knows, someone might have trimmed off enough of the small stuff to squeeze your car under, with breath held, by the time you returned so you could sleep in your own bed without a two mile midnight walk first.  And if your luck really holds, you might find that someone else had cleared the whole thing by the next morning.

You may even have felt a bit fortunate that you didn’t have to invest significant labor to address these problems yourself (although I admit that emergency chainsaw work is kind of fun), unless of course you just thought it to be a kind of karmic justice after spending several hours of the holiday with a pole saw in your mother’s driveway - you guessed it - trimming trees.