| Caught by a trail camera: For a few bucks, you learn a lot
The two deer caught by the trail camera at night are a spike and an eight-point with heads down and antlers interlocked, but this is only a play fight. If that eight-point were rutting, he'd drive the spike off in seconds. Charley Guenther looks at the photograph made by an automated camera on his hunting camp near this Osceola County town and says, "The amazing thing is that several of us have seen that spike, but no one has seen the eight-point. In fact, there are eight different bucks in the pictures that the camera took this week, and I think we've only see two of them." Trail cameras are becoming enormously popular among hunters, largely because the price has dropped as low as $49.95, and $130-$200 buys a digital model that will make excellent pictures for months on end and store hundreds of images on a data card not much bigger than a postage stamp.
Bag a bargain online
Christmas shoppers can bag substantial savings by going online rather than to the high street, research by UK consumer group Which? shows. It found that savings of more than 1,000 pounds could be made on a shopping list of five popular gifts - a flat-screen television, camera, camcorder, hi-fi and DVD recorder. Researchers compared prices on 72 products at 111 retailers and found that online savings ranged from 11% on digital camcorders to 29% on LCD and plasma televisions. Savings could also be made on everything from books (14%) and MP3/MP4 players (11%) to CDs (7%) and champagne (2%). But games consoles - such as the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 - were found to be similarly priced. "The trick to bagging a bargain is to discover which stores offer the most extras," Which? said in its November magazine.
Top shots of the week A selection of Daily Dispatch readers’ photographs of sights around the Eastern Cape
DAILY VISTA: This week�s winning image is a sublime land and beachscape taken in Port St Johns, between Agate Terrace and Poenskop, with a Panasonic DMC-FZ20 digital camera. Picture: Sabine Verkuijl
YOUNG ACTOR: This photograph capturing both the personality and innocence of the subject was taken at the Grahamstown festival of a young mime artist in training. A Canon Rebel XT(EOS 350D) with a 200mm Sigma lens were used. Picture: TREVOR HURN
THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY: This giraffe in the sunset was captured in the Kruger Park with a Fuji Finepix 3800. Picture: JUSTIN KREUSCH
SMOKE THAT THUNDERS: An image of which famous landscape artist Thomas Baines would be proud, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Picture: IAN PRICE
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS: This unusual close up of a Spotted Bush Snake was taken in Beacon Bay with a Canon EOS 350D Sigma 28-300mm lens.
Twenty20 launches VholdR
The other day we thought that 2008 was going to be the year of the GPS, with Garmin, SatMap and others launching new, compact, outdoorsy navigational gizmos. But today 2008 is clearly going to be the year of the self-contained helmetcam. Interbike had early signs, with VIO launching its high-end, solid-state recording POV1 (although that's not really self-contained, there's a wire between the camera bit and the recorder) and GoPro flooding the world with bijou Digital Hero cameras. And now helmetcam specialists Twenty20 have stepped up with a solution that fits neatly between those two in capability and price. Behold, then, the curiously-named VholdR "wearable camcorder". Unlike its previous products, the VholdR has no wires and doesn't rely on an external recording device.
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