Downtown Tour 4/4/09

This was the 2nd time Eyes of Hawaii did a downtown architectural history walking tour. Last time, I did not have my wide angle lens so this time I made great use of it for my shots. We started at the municipal parking lot then walking along Beretania thru Fort Street mall, then Chinatown, and finally, to have a dim sum lunch. It was great exercise and a great time.
I think the wide angle lens made my buildings rather distorted and I had a difficult time figuring out if the photo was straight.
We walked to Washington Palace and I took a quick shot.
We went to Saint Andrews Cathedral and there was a choir practicing. The acoustics was really good in there and their singing was so beautiful...I wanted to stay to listen longer...but the group was leaving me behind.
The cathedral grounds looked like a medieval castle.
We headed down to Fort Street Mall to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace where Father Damien was ordained in May 1864.
I think photographing the Hawaii Theatre at night would be really nice w/ the lights turned on.
We walked thru Chinatown and it's kinda neat to see the contrast of this old building w/ greenery growth coming out of it.
The Chinatown Gateway park has a really nice waterfall pond...unfortunately, the water is really cruddy. But, with the old industrial looking building in background, it all kinda fits in.
I've always wanted to photograph this park and the lion sculpture but was afraid w/ all the homeless. I'm glad I got a chance to do so today with the group.
We ended up in the historical downtown area. I got a chance to take the Cole Academy again, this time w/ the wide angle lens so I was able to get the entire building block.

Auto Show 3/29/09

The auto show was another challenging shoot. It was very bright in the convention center, but bright lights on shiny cars make for a lot of glare. Also, the lighting on each car, even those right next to each other was surprisingly different. I had to review each shot on my LCD to see if it was too dark or too bright that it really ate up a lot of my battery. Here's my collection of shiny car shots.. I think a polarizer would've helped some.
I tried different angles, from over the car to kneeling shots..I had a really good workout..
The redness of this car looked kinda orange in this light...
The florescent lights overhead shows up as streaks on the car, especially on dark colored car...
The fancy cars were parked next to the bright window of the convention center for passerbys to see..but it made for a really bad photo op because it got really blown out.
Everyone was looking at this Audi, especially in the rear..
Because you can see the engine in the back..kinda neat, but I don't know how it'll work out when the engine gets hot.
There were really nice antique cars..ones w/ fancy hood ornaments.
It was nice of the guy at the antique auto club to let us take closer shots of all the cars. He even gave us some interesting info about the cars.
There were also a corvette club display in the upstairs exhibition area. How they got the cars up here, I really don't know.
This is a really cute original mini cooper I saw as I arrived to the auto show.. I took shots before and after the show to try to get one w/o as much glare and this is the best I could get.
The cars were all so shiny that you can even see your own reflection!!

Kuhio Day Parade 3/28/09

I wanted to watch the Kuhio Day Parade in Waikiki but arrived just in time as the parade was winding down.
As I followed the end of the parade down Kalakaua, I came upon a group of men gathering around the Prince Kuhio statue. I stayed to watch the brief ceremony of laying flower leis.
I snuck my way into the crowd and took a shot of the ceremony and watched the men placed some leis at the foot of the statue.

Pregnant Opae'ula Shrimp 3/26/09

I've had this shrimp ecosystem on my desk since 2002 and they have started to repopulate with babies. My friend Cindy and I actually counted three pregnant shrimps in my tank today. It's amazing to watch them swim around holding on to all the eggs. We were lucky to capture these very cool shots using Cindy's Panasonic Lumix set to Macro mode. So here are my versions of my very own 'octomoms'...it's so exciting..I think it takes almost a month before the eggs will hatch.
Here's one of the pregnant Opaeula with some babies...
There's some cruddy stuff that's all over the bottom of the tank but somehow, it doesn't seem to affect the Opaeula.

Byodo-In Temple 3/21/09

The 3rd photography class field trip was to the Byodo-In Temple at the Valley of the Temple. The day was overcast so the color of the temple became a bit muted. Like what Jennifer Wu said in her lecture to use all your equipment on a shoot, I tried out all my different lens to capture different zooms. I even tried to get a panoramic shot using my tripod, but I was unsuccessful to get a good merge out of it. Guess I'll have to go back and try again some day.
There's a small garden of bamboos in the back of the temple with a lot of carvings of visitor's names. It was windy and the bamboo made these creaking noise that sounded like the bamboo would crack and break. I got scared that I just took two quick shots and left.
These swans at the temple were very people friendly and didn't run away when you take their pictures.
I found one sitting on an egg in the bushes..
Even the cat was people friendly and didn't mind you taking his/her photo.
The kois were sure hungry, even with all those people who bought food to feed them.
As we were leaving, Celia mentioned what we heard at the same lecture about taking a photo from a different perspective..so I took this shot from a higher vantage point as we were leaving the parking on our way out..

Magic Island Panorama 3/20/09

My first real attempt at using my XT to produce a panoramic photo. The photo merging for the night shot was a little challenging since it is really small when loaded to Elements so to manually merge the photo is really difficult to see.
I manually set the exposure time for each shot to 30 seconds instead of using Aperture priority since I wanted to make sure that all 5 shots had the same amount of exposure and that seemed to help.

Ballet at AMC stage 3/20/09

Taking photos of ballet was like taking sports. They are so fast going across the stage. I went up to the 2nd floor to get different perspective shots but the added challenge I faced was the lighting.
There was this really bright spot light that became a white circle in my pics. It was so distracting in my shot that I decided to turn these photos to black and white..
This could've been a great shot.. except my 50mm wasn't wide enough, and I cut off her foot...argh!