Happy Chinese New Year 1/24/09

I spent a day in Chinatown for the celebration of the Lunar New Year festivities. There were crowds of people, lots of food, and lions were everywhere. It was like a zoo! At the end of the day, we saw the Night in Chinatown Parade down Hotel street.
It's a tradition to feed the lion for good luck...where there is a lion, there were lots of people waiting to feed them.Even the stores provide a challenging way to feed the lion.Hmm..so why did the dragon cross the road? To get to the Parade!! Actually this shot kinda reminds me of the Beatles album cover.Lots of the lions were lined up waiting for the start of the parade.A parade is never complete w/o dignitary..Beauty queens..Clowns..
Lions..
And finally, dragons.

Wahiawa Botanical Garden 1/19/09

This is the first time I visited the Wahiawa Botanical Garden and found it to be a beautifully hidden paradise of plants. The grounds were really well maintained and there were much to photograph.
I've seen these Jade flowers on leis but didn't know they grow on vines.
I'm amazed how strong these tall bamboos are.The bright sunlight was really harsh to photograph, but I finally got one of the Ohia blossom.
I tried taking the entire foot bridge using my wide zoom lens. The afternoon sunlight was really harsh.
Then got a great suggestion from Paster Curtis to try taking a different perspective, climbing down a slope. This came out much better.
Here are some of the flowers.Here's what I call "reflection from a puddle of water".Celia was kind enough to let me use her new 70-200mm IS F2.8L lens and I was able to take these really sharp zoom shots. These were taken from the foot bridge and maximum zoom were used on these shots.
The zoom lens is super sharp and the Image Stabilzation(IS) really helped get the subject sharp.
This is "trust in your monopod"..Erick hanging his camera over the bridge to get some cool shots.
I was able to get a quite a bit of sharp shots w/ the lens, thanks to Celia.

Chinese New Year Festival 1/17/09

Our photog group went to Chinese Cultural Plaza for the Chinese New Year Festival. It was really crowded with people, food booths and entertainment. Here's a small sampling of what I saw. To shoot some of the action shots in this not so well lit place, I had to use ISO 1600 even though I was using F2.8, so some of the shots came out a little grainy.

More High School Basketball 1/6/09

Boys basketball in a Gym not as well lit as Stan Sherriff was another challenging shoot. I found that my 50mm lens is sharpest at F2.2 so I set it on Manual mode using 1/250 and as high as 1/320 and ISO 1600. Mid-Pac, the home team won tonight with a score of 56 to 29.This is the only shot using F1.4 that came out really sharp. I suspect it's because it was at close distance.