White Flame Phlox

White Flame Phlox
Phlox paniculata 'Bartwentynine'
(floks) (pan-ick-yoo-LAY-tuh)

This is one of two dwarf white Phlox we tried this year. When the Phlox are advertised as ‘mildew resistant’ you have to take that with a grain of salt. This cultivar actually didn’t get the powdery mildew until very late in the season. By that time it was ready to be cut back anyway so it did make it through most of the season looking good. That was with one general fungicide spray on the leaves before the flowers came out in June.

One thing about ‘White Flame’ that was nice was the plant stayed compact. The leaves were closer to together and that gave the plant a more of a bushy (that's a real technical term, eh) appearance. They didn’t need to be staked which was a big bonus in their cultivation; final height was about 15 inches.

Bartels Stek developed the ‘Flame’ series of Phlox in the Netherlands. They have been breeding plants since the 1930’s and it shows with this series of Phlox.

Today is the day! The new camera is supposed to arrive. UPS tried to deliver it yesterday even though that was a day earlier than the two-day shipping. I hope I don’t have to drive around the neighborhood to track the driver down in the huge snowstorm that is going to hit today.

After much agonizing and research I decided to get the Nikon D700. The full frame sensor really tipped the scales towards the D700. This is a replacement for my D70s, which has been a great camera and is still usable but is now several generations behind. I’ll keep the D70s as a back up but don’t see it getting a whole lot of use.

Since the D700 is a full frame camera the 1.5 crop factor on the lenses is gone. I am lucky in the fact most of my lenses are FX (full frame) as opposed to DX (cropped sensor). I did order two new lenses with the new camera. I got the AF-S VR Micro-Nikkor105mm f/2.8G IF-ED. Which is kind of legendary as far as macro lenses go. This is the updated version with the Vibration Reduction system. The second lens I ordered was the AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED telephoto lens. I wanted the 70-200mm 2.8 lens but just couldn’t bite off the price. The zoom lens is a little slow but hopefully the VR will help with the low light performance. I am not particularly fond of Zooms but felt like having a 300mm lens would be fun.

So for lenses that will be full frame on the new camera I will be using the:

Sigma EX 24mm/1.8
Nikon 50mm/1.8
Nikon Micro-Nikkor 60mm/2.8D macro
Nikon Micro-Nikkor 105mm/2.8G macro VR
Sigma DL 28-200mm/3.5-5.6 Hyper zoom Macro
Nikon 70-300mm 4.5-5.6G VR

If you can’t get the shot with all that you might as well hang it up. :lol: Since Karen and I both wanted a true pocket camera we also ordered the Nikon Coolpix P6000. So actually two new cameras are arriving today (truly a happy day). The P6000 was one of the few compact cameras that had fully manual controls. It also shoots a huge 13.5 megapixel files. This camera didn’t have everything I wanted but it is a bit of a trade off for its size.

Since both of these cameras take much larger files some new memory cards were in order. They sure are a lot cheaper these days. I got a two pack of 4GB Secure Digital cards for $19.90 and two new 8GB Compact Flash cards for 19.95 each.

Image courtesy of Nikon USA

Isn’t she a beauty. I will be reviewing the performance after a couple of weeks.