Since I had written quite a bit already about last night's lunar eclipse experience, I thought I'd throw everything together for the benefit of Tochi Hut readers.
Lunar Eclipse on February 20th, 2008. Toronto was blessed with crystal clear skies, so I was more than happy to settle with the -12C temperatures. Everyone is posting these beautiful photos of the moon eclipse, so I'm doing the same. This photo was taken around 10pm, almost to the point of complete eclipse - cropped a lot. :)
In the following shot, I noticed two bright stellar objects, Regulus (star) at 12 o'clock and Saturn at 8 o'clock to the moon. I zoomed out a bit to catch them into the frame. Looking through the viewfinder, it seemed like I was staring at some distant planet instead of the moon. It was quite a cool extraterrestrial feeling.
After a while, I was getting a little cold. BlueOrca had linked me to a site showing a very cool super long exposure shot of another lunar eclipse. Since I was going inside anyway, I decided to leave my camera out for an hour to capture the following shot.
The original photo was shot at a pretty wide angle, since I didn't really know the path of the moon. The noise reduction processing on the camera took over 30 minutes. The sky colours came out very redish, almost pink. I didn't really know how to fix it, so I just played around with various settings until I got the sky darkish again. I also cropped the photo to "zoom" in on the trail.
It's quite cool to see the moon streak go from almost all red to all white as the lunar eclipse began to unravel. :)
Monday was Victoria Day in Canada, in celebration of the Queen's birthday. One can say V-Day is the sister holiday to Memorial Day (and not 4th of July! *cough*) in the States. As with all Victoria Day from years past, it's the first holiday of the year where people can enjoy setting off their own fireworks.
With great angst, I decided to delay my viewing of 24 and Heroes's season finale to go out and watch the fireworks display at Vandorf Community Park near Aurora. I really didn't expect much of a show, since this was a small community show. But it was a good opportunity to test TochiCam in a night setting. The next big fireworks display would be July 1st - too far away.
Overall, the show was rather subpar, but there was a really good community atmosphere. Seeing the little kids running and dancing around to the music. Everyone had sparkers and glow sticks. It was very nice to hang out on such a beautiful night. ;-)
I had a much harder time taking fireworks pictures with my dSLR than my old Nikon, mainly because I didn't know how to use the camera. Eventually, I figured out how to adjust the aperature and exposure time settings properly and made liberal use of the continuous shooting mode. I collected the best of the photos of the night and uploaded them to Flickr. Enjoy!
P.S. I got back just in time to catch Heroes, and then spent the next 2 hrs watching Doyle being dumb and Jack saving the world... again.
On Friday, as I was coming home, I saw a huge plume of white smoke at Jenny Wong's Beauty Spa. This spa has been around for a while and I always found their building to be quite unique. It was such an out-of-place house stuck between a ravine and a busy shopping plaza. Anyway, I was quite shocked when I saw the many fire trucks at the scene, and the entire roof being burnt through. It was almost unreal.
According to MingPao's account, there was some roof repair work being done earlier that day. The spa had been in operation for ten years, and they were afraid that the roof was getting too old and would leak water through, so they decided to get some routine repair done. The cause of fire is still undetermined but may be related to the roofing job. Ironically, the spa doesn't have a roof now, and they have a very big water "leak"/flooding problem.
I was chatting with RC (Rich) afterwards, and gave him the shocking news about his favourite spa and how I wanted to take my dSLR out to grab some pics. It was the perfect opportunity for my SLR camera to make its first trip outdoors to the real world. On the other hand, I just didn't feel right taking pictures of other people's suffering. Rich told me he'd do the same thing, so I decided, what the heck.
By the time I got back to the scene, the fire had been put out already, and I missed most of the action. What a poor reporter I'd make. lol. I felt really uneasy standing alone on the sidewalk taking pictures. Photographing the building was alright, but taking pictures of the people was really awkward. But I really wanted pictures a firefighter in full gear, so I snuck a few shots in when they weren't looking at me.
As I have been for the past few days, I'm still surprised by the colour quality of these pics. Some of the pictures were slightly blurry, but without the VR, they would have been a lot worse. For the last picture, I was standing on the sidewalk in an unsupported position, with my zoom fully extended (300mm). The picture came out clear! I love TochiCam and TochiLensVR.