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I read in the Honolulu Advertiser on Tuesday about Nasa crashing a rocket into the moon at 1:30am on Friday. So, I stayed up..waited .. and took this first shot of the moon at 12:30am. Thanks to the moon photo from Celia's blog, I used the same settings (F8, 1/500, ISO 400 @ 200mm), and got the 'Before' impact shot.
At around 1:33am, I took this second shot.. hmm... I don't see any difference... well, needless to say, it was a dud to photograph. All I got out of it was a sleepless night.
It's August 15th and according to the Lunar calendar, it is full moon and time for the Moon Festival, when Chinese eat moon cake. I saw the full moon rise and ran for my camera, lens, Tripod, AND moon cake. It was miraculous I didn't drop anything! I saw it for about 2 minutes and before I was able to get a good shot, it was gone, covered beneath thick clouds!!! Half hour later, it was out..and very bright.
I had the idea this year of taking a shot of a moon cake against the full moon. The second attempt to get the full moon was a success. I mounted my camera on tripod, held the plate out in front of my lens, with the moon cake on a slight tilt so that you can see part of the top design yet making sure it does not slide off, then clicked w/ my other hand. After a few tries, here's my result:
Moon cake usually has a doughy crust and a sweet filling made of lotus seed paste. 
In the center, there's a salted duck egg yolk. Since it's pretty dense, you have to drink a lot of hot tea to wash it all down.
I'd assume in the ancient days, people would sit around and enjoy moon cake under a full moon, just like these figures my dad used for his bonsai plants.
I had so much fun on Saturday, Celia, Erick and I went again to see the Thunderbirds, this time from the Airport parking lot. I was surprised that there were a lot of other people who had the same idea and braved the hot sun to see them. This time, I had the vantage point to watch the Thunderbirds take off. 
I caught a few few more shots (after cropping) of the Thunderbirds.
It was cool to see them fly by the control tower. 
I caught a shot w/ Diamond Head..
Even though they perform in front of Hickam, they actually kept up the maneuver in front of the airport.
On Sunday, the planes landed back at the Honolulu Airport instead of Hickam.
I was going thru my pics from Saturday, and I noticed one of the pilot actually waved at us.
This was Pilot #3 who was waving.
Then I noticed pilot #5 had an upside-down number 5 sewn on his uniform which made me wonder..
Because I caught his plane and the number under it was also upside down. I did some googling and this is what I found:In mirror formations, one Thunderbird must be inverted, and it is always Thunderbird number 5. In fact, the "5" on this aircraft is painted on upside down, and thus appears right-side-up for much of the routine). At the end of the routine, all six aircraft join in formation, forming the Delta. There is also an extra amount of humor regarding the inverted performance of Thunderbird Five: the pilots all wear tailored flight suits with their name and jet number embroidered on the left breast. The 5 is sewn inverted.
I saw the Thunderbirds when they performed in Waikiki in 2007 and I had just started to learn to take pictures w/ my XT so I was so excited to hear they came back and I would get another chance to take pictures of them. My friend, her niece and nephew and I was fortunate to be at Hickam for their open house and the Thunderbird air show this weekend . There were restrictions on what you can bring and I brought my 70-200mm lens but had to keep the lens and body separate so that it could fit into an 8"x8" bag..OK..it was more like 8"x9". Therefore, I was limited to close shots but I managed to take a panaoramic of the Thunderbirds just so I can get all 6 of them together.
I think I had to stand several hundred yards away to fit the entire plane into my shot. I don't know if this was old the Air Force One, but it sure looked like it. It was so hot that people found shade sitting under the airplane wings.
We visited the different planes on display where there were photo ops for kids.
It was so hot, anyone who can find some shade was very lucky.
I was surprised to find the Thunderbirds parked right on the air strip in plain site.
The show started about 5 minutes late, but it started w/ a boom and with grand maneuvers. I had such a hard time getting them in focus thru all the excitement.
After trying Av, Tv and even P settings, I was able to finally get some focused shots and settled on using Tv (Shutter priority) @ 1/1250 and ISO 200. I kept the focus point at the center because they were so fast, my camera didn't seem to be able to pick the right place to focus.
They were so noisy with their fly by the kids had to cover their ears.
Most of the time, there were 4 Thunderbirds flying together, then the other two would do solo maneuvers.
I think they called this the "mirror formation".
Here's a crop of the planes. It looks like I photoshopped them together.. but i didn't. They were THAT close..
The other two planes joined the rest and as I was just getting the hang of tracking them w/ my focus point, the show was over.
I was surprised that they came in for a landing right in front of the audience. Everyone started to leave for their cars, which gave me a chance to jockey to the front to get close up shots of the planes as they taxi back to their respective spots.
The whole deplaning process was a ceremony too.
I stayed and watched as the pilots came toward the crowd were I was standing.
They handed out booklets for the kids and the pilots signed autograph and I went totally "papparazzi " and started snapping shots of the pilots.
There was also a female pilot of the group, but I don't think she flew today.
To avoid the mass traffic jam leaving Hickam, the kids had shaved ice and we sat to watch this band play. It was a super hot day...but well worth it to wait in the hot sun to watch the magnificent Thunderbirds.
It was unfortunate that there were not as many blossoms as there were the last time I visited.
My HDR of flowers didn't really work out and the only one that looked natural was this pitcher plant.. there was only one blossom that didn't turn brown. This hanging plant is usually swinging in the wind from the fans blowing so it is especially hard to get a good HDR shot.
There were mostly green plants in the green house...(duh?!!)
Just outside the green house is this statue of a girl with butterflies. Around this area I saw a lot of butterflies dancing around the flowers.
I waited patiently until I was able to capture these two shots of butterflies. These were cropped since I was using my wide angle lens and wasn't able to get too close without scaring away the butterfly. There's even a caterpillar in the flowers. 
I wanted to get a panorama of the cannon ball tree, but that photo also didn't turn out and I got this instead. I think this is the largest tree in the garden...It took 3 shots to build this panorama.
