Honolulu Festival Parade 3/15/09

This year's parade down Kalakaua lasted longer than previous year and we diehards stuck it out thru light rain and darkness. I used my 50mm for most of these shots because of my continuing AF problem. The 50mm made the subjects closer so I had a larger focus spot. Unfortunately, in order to not cut off the subject, I had to take all my shots in portrait format. Here are my collection of portrait shots.
As it got dark, my XT gave me lots of problems because I had to shoot at wide aperture and the flash pretty much washed out the subject, like this aboriginal performer.
A performer from Japan decided to do an impromptu flip for us.Here's the float from the convention center. It is much more colorful when lit.
After watching the parade for more than 4 hours, the finale -- the fire breathing dragon...pretty cool and worth the wait, even though it went by pretty fast.
Here's a sample of what I call my 'wandering AF' problem..kinda like the 'wandering eye'..where you are focused on everything other than the subject right in front of you....I need to get it fixed.

Honolulu Festival 3/14-3/15/09

I had great fun at the two-day Honolulu Festival at the convention center. There were crafts and activities as well as non-stop entertainment including an Anime concert finale. I learned to deal with my XT's 'roaming AF' problem where I can't focus on objects farther away at aperture wider than F2.8. I ended up having to do a lot of close up shots so that the AF would be able to find something to focus on. Here is one of the floats for the parade.
There were hand crafts from Japan.
There were a lot of colorful costumed entertainers from Japan. I was able to get really close to the stage without getting scolded by the staff. :-)
There were also performers from the Philippines who let me take their picture.
And taiko performers. I was in the 2nd row in the audience so I was able to shoot using my 50mm at wide aperture (F2.8) and ISO 800. I discovered that since the performer filled up most of the shot, my XT was able to produce sharp shots as it should.
Then, the Anime section had the Doraemon mascot.
And the finale of the Honolulu Festival..anime singer Momoi Halko. Her fans (mostly young guys) were going crazy over her.
I totally went paparazzo to get this shot, I had to stand on a chair to shoot over the fans in front of the stage.

BE Cuauhtemoc from Mexico 3/14/09

After a day of rain, there was finally blue sky so I went to check out the Tall Ship from Mexico en route to Japan on a six months voyage. It's a magnificent ship that carries some 275 sailors and it was open to the public before it leaves on Monday.
The sailors where climbing the mast to get rain water out of its sails.These sailors climb high up on the sails. They made it look effortless.Since the ship was too large to fit in my 16mm lens, I got the bright idea to go to the top of Aloha Tower. Unfortunately, the building blocked the entire ship..Argh!!

NYC 2004 and Photo Merging

I learned about Photoshop Photo Merging from EV and decided to try it myself. I took 5 shots of Manhattan across the Hudson River using my Canon S45 digital in 2004 when I went to NYC. At the time, I had found the feature on my camera but I never read the manual on how to stitch them together.
I happen to remember these photos today and decided to give photo merging a try. Even though the exposure didn't match up (which is something you are supposed to watch out for and fix, according to my book) and I wasn't using a tripod, it still turned out pretty cool.

Lyon Arboretum 3/7/09

My photography class' 2nd field trip was to Lyon Arborteum. We got there before they opened at 9am and it looked really beautiful w/ the morning mist and the clouds over the mountains. There were dew drops on the leaves and everything was really green. Although I was there only briefly, I was able to get some first impression shots.
This is the first time for me to use RAW format. I think it has really helped in post-processing to fix up my exposure and white balance mistakes.
I took this shot and then changed the saturation to make it look greener. Then I pushed the saturation to the b/w end and got the second version. I actually kinda like the b/w version better.
There were several a lily ponds, but only had time to take one.The dew drops and the overcast sky with light rain worked out nicely for greenery shots.

Shooting Basketball with Wide Angle Lens

I've never thought to shoot basketball with a wide angle lens before since most times, the photos you see in publications are of closeup shots with blurry background. But I thought I'd give it a try this time.
What I found was that you can catch a lot more of the action away from the player w/ the ball.You can get the sheer size of the gym.And, even being just a couple of rows away, you can still get a very large group shot.