I'm staying up late to work on a presentation I have to give tomorrow afternoon. Unfortunately, instead of focusing on my presentation slides, I ended up critiquing some photos with Morph. One of the photos that came up was this sunset shot I took at Woodbine Park on Saturday.
My initial goal was to capture the sun between the lamp post and tree. Morph pointed out the lamp post was not perfectly straight, which was distracting. I didn't even notice that until he pointed it out! I admit, the framing of the lamp post was rather poor. The tree was unable to offset the impact of the much more rigid post.
The other distraction in the picture was the bird. Morph thought the bird does not really add anything to the picture. I had to disagree, since a bird silhouette is so cool! Had the bird cooperated and was actually in line with the level of the post and tree, the picture would have been shifted downwards. I definitely focused too much on the sky and should have caught more of the tree line at the bottom. The sun at 1/3 from bottom would have been a better composition. I blame this all on the bird for flying too high.
Despite some areas for improvement, I'm quite happy with the exposure and mood of the picture. The cloud layering turned out much better than expected. The picture captured what I intended... the calm and peaceful sunset.
One of the coolest exhibit for Luminato was definitely the "Pulse Front" exhibit at Harbourfront Centre. The exhibit is a set of spotlights placed around the Harbourfront district, controlled by computers to light up the Toronto skyline. The coolness factor does not end here though. Beside each light turret is a little metal stand with two little handle bars. You grasp two handle bars for 10-15 seconds. The bar somehow detects the pulse from your hands and syncs up the nearby light turret to your heartbeat. Hence, PULSE FRONT.
Man, this exhibit was so uber cool. Holding the bars felt like I was manning some futuristic laser gun turret, whereby I was controlling/firing the beams subconsciously. The only thing missing was the recoil effect, but it's a laser gun after all.
I just got news that this exhibit is being extended to June 17th! A little aside for some photography analysis. It was rather difficult to capture the lights. Given the night scene, the exposure definitely had to be long in order to get the proper exposure on the buildings. However, since the beams of light were always in motion, I couldn't set the shutter speed for too long (or else everything looks like fans of light). In the end, I had to forgo some picture quality and set up the ISO quite high and open up to the widest aperture, in order to get a manageable shutter speed. The photos were taken with my Tokina 12-24mm wide angle lens. More photos can be found at my Flickr page.
A while back, KH showed me pictures he took at some Chinese cultural festival. I've wanted to take a crack at shooting under similar settings. On Saturday, I finally got the opportunity, as I went to Market for another Toronto First Radio event. This event was entitled "金腰面之決戰前夕" (The Duel) starring the two DJ's from the 男人咀對咀 show. 腰面派兩大掌門決裂 - 武林勢必哄動!
金腰面 is a game they've been playing on their radio show for many years. I don't fully understand the rules, but normally, the two DJ's each pick a song. Callers will then select one of the two songs (Song A or Song B), whichever they like more. After some complicated voting system, the winning DJ will say to the losing DJ : "你金腰面!!" Not fully sure what it means, but one theory is that it sounds like "你'禁'要面!" (You really want to 'save face').
In this night, it was the ultimate showdown between the two host DJ's. Ten of the stations DJ's were split into two teams. One DJ from both teams battle 1-on-1 in each round by both singing a song. Audience would then vote for Song A or Song B. Five rounds - Best of three. The losing side in each round will have to suffer one of "滿清四大酷刑!" (Qing Dynasty's four major forms of torture!) While the singing was very good overall, the most memorable parts were, of course, the punishment! Kind of wish I had a P&S to record some videos, but pictures are worth a thousand words.
Round 1 Punishment: 辣辣壽司 (HOT HOT SUSHI)
Two plates of sushi, one hot, one not.
Ah Lau picked the normal one. He's home free.
Hold on.... Punishment requires eating BOTH dishes.
>_<;;;
Round 2 Punishment: Balls
One of the more severe and hilarious punishments of the night. Golf ball - up one, down other. Pictures tell all.
Round 3 Punishment: Pie in Face
Pretty self-explanatory...
Round 4 Punishment: Shoe in Face
Rather disgusting.... Sniff three times.
Round 5 Punishment: ULTIMATE punishment
Dress up and take five pictures with the audience and collect five quarters. LOL.
Final Results
Overall, a fun night. Learned a lot about photography and the limitations of my camera and lens under low light conditions. The faces in the pictures were redder than normal, but I suspect that was due to the uneven lighting on the stage. Try to account for that next time.
Saturday night marked the official architectural opening of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). An astounding bold structure in the heart of the city, this $270 million jagged outcrop took four years to complete. There were big holes in the ground in years one and two and a really ugly steel structure in year three. So it was very nice to see the building finally completed.
Some people love it, some people hate it, but this crystal has everyone talking about it. I really love the fact that it is daring and so different. Walking down Bloor Street, it's hard not to slow down and take notice. In broad daylight, the structure does not look as magnificent, as the planked facade gives it a dull weathered looked. Maybe it would look better if it was all glass - I dunno. At night though... Wow.
The opening of the Crystal was launched to coincide with the opening ceremonies of Luminato, Toronto's Festival of Arts and Creativity. Luminato is a week long celebration of film, literature, dance, music and imagery. A LOT of activities going on this week, so definitely check some of them out if in town.
Following the opening speeches by the many distinguished guests of honour was the night's free concert dubed"A World of Possibilities". My group came out from dinner late, and by the time we got back to the ROM, it was PACKED. A little unfortunate that we couldn't get close enough to the stage, but we were close to a big screen that was projecting all the action.
The theme of the concert evolved around humanity and time, fitting for a museum setting. In short, evil "Dr. Time" has had enough of humans' mistakes over the past centuries and want to end the world at 11:02pm on June 2nd, 2007. The rest of the concert was to convince Dr. Time to give humanity another chance (more time), by showcasing aspects of the cultures that make humans so different and unique. A bit cheesy, but a good way to tie all the performances together, and suitable for the family.
The concert was a collection of assorted performances, ranging from pop, classical, rock, jazz, opera, folk and gospel, aboriginal and David Suzuki. Some of the more memorable performances: Eva Avila, winner of the Canadian Idol. I don't follow any idols, but her song was great (especially after the subpar tap-dancers). Then, there was the Trinidadian-born comedian Jean Paul, who gave us a load-down on Trinidad and Zulu, including their nice accents and how to use "I own five cows" as pickup lines. One of the most impressive performance of the night featured The Canadian Tenors. I've never heard of them before, so I was thinking since they bear the "Canadian" title in their name, they better not be a disgrace. Man, their voices sounded so awesome, and was the first and one of the few performances of the night that brought the "crowd to its feet". Isabel Bayrakdarian, some opera soprano, was pretty cool. I've never really paid any attention to opera before, so it was a good first experience. The best part of the show was definitely the finale, an original musical that David Foster composed and orchestrated for the event. Started off with Alexandria Maillot, who was joined by Cody Karey, followed by a children's choir and Jann Arden! It was such a passionate inspirational piece - totally captures the energy, emotions, and really, the human spirit of the evening. "Imagine what we could do!"
Went to some sketchy Korean joint on Bloor afterwards. To get to the place, you had to go through some nondescript entrance and up some narrow stairwell. However, the place was a nice bar, with really fancy cushions as seats in their booths. Tried some cocktail So-ju for the first time and played rounds of Big 2 for the rest of the night.
Oh yeah, one thing I should mention. On the way back to ROM after dinner, we saw this topless woman walking ahead of us. Apparently, she had patches covering the essential areas. The gals accused us guys of showing too much reaction! In my defense, we only saw the back of the woman, so it was natural that we were curious, when there's so much left to imagination. hahah.
With three finds under my belt, I am now pretty much an official geocacher. Geocaching, in a simple fashion, is a treasure hunt, whereby one is given the GPS coordinates of the treasure. There are many flavours and twists to this concept, but general premise is the same. Steal the treasure and log it.
Kung introduced me to this sport by telling me about the adventures of his geocaching pal in Nevada. I read up on it a while back and didn't give it too much thought. A few weeks back, I mentioned geocaching to some wannabe detective. All of a sudden, after spending agonizing hours coming up with the alias "MrMonk", the dude went crazy and starting hunting from the wee hours of the morning to past the dusk hours of the night. Not wanting to fall too far behind, I signed on-board too.
Things didn't start too rosy for me. For some reason, I decided to pick a rather difficult cache. It was a multi-cache (MC), where the first cache will provide clues or coordinates to a second one, and so forth, until you get to the final cache. This particular MC hunt was in German Mills Park. I've driven by it so many times, and was always curious at what laid at the end of Leslie St.
In terms of gear, the basic tool of the trade is a GPS. I don't have one. So really, I was totally screwed for this MC hunt. I had the coords for the first cache, but would need to go back to a computer to look up any new coords I picked up. But what the heck. Armed with a gMap printout of the first location, I headed to the park after work. The first hint was a Christmas tree. The cache is suppose to be an ammo box. I spotted the LONE evergreen in that area (matched perfectly with the printout) and searched literally everywhere around it for 20 minutes. The cache wasn't freaking there!
Came back home rather disappointed, I was scolded for not reading the log entries left by fellow geocachers on the cache's website for hints. I thought it was really cheating to read all that, but apparently, not having a GPS was a good enough "excuse". LOL.
One of the entries read: "We found the first stage quickly, but it was nestled right against a birds nest, and the bird flew out as we reached in to retrieve the coords." OMG. I looked everywhere around and under the tree, but didn't look in or up the TREE! I didn't even notice a bird's nest earlier. big SIGH.
I went back the following day feeling rather confident. Got back to the tree, and easily spotted the bird's nest! There were younglings in the nest, barely able to open their eyes! One of their parent got scared as I approached the nest, flew off and was observing me from this post.
Back to the cache, I looked everywhere in the tree, and everywhere around the tree again. NO CACHE! WTF. Someone must have stolen the cache or something. It was bad too, as I wasn't as careful this time - accidentally brushed my naked skin against some stinging nettles. My arm and hand were itching like crazy for the rest of the night.
I was more pissed than disappointed. I spent two days looking for one cache and failed, while my arch-rival MrMonk had found FIVE caches in two days.
Anyway, since I had to head down to Ithaca over the weekend, I decided to read up on the caches around my alma mater. Found a couple "ideal" candidates that might be simple enough to find. Ended up discovering my first ever cache by Uris Library and the clock tower. It was a little key holder box, and nicely hidden in a pretty obvious location. There were a lot of muggle families around taking photos with all the graduate candidates, so I had to be rather careful and discrete when retreiving and restoring the cache.
By the time I got back to Canada, MrMonk was already up to TWELVE caches. WTF. I decided to tackle a simpler cache in the same German Mills Park. I picked up the coordinates and was pretty sure I was in the right area of the forest. I found the supposed tree stump with the cache, but could not spot the cache. I looked around for a while and came back to the stump, stepping on some logs around it. All of a sudden, one of the logs gave way slightly under my feet. I quicky jumped away and removed the log. The cache was sitting underneath in plain sight! I had almost crushed the cache by accident. haha.
Lots of goodies in this cache. Left a silver "Learning Science" pencil I had from teaching some grade 8 kids a while back. I didn't have any better toys, haha. I took a tiny bumble bee eraser from the cache.
Overall, GeoCaching has been pretty fun. There are a surprisingly large number of caches in the area. It is kind of amazing how so many "treasures" are hidden all around us. The best part is that these hunts often brings you to local areas that you have never realized existed.
My current stats: 3 caches FOUND in TWO countries.