Whut

Haaaaaaaaaaaallooooooooooooo!

Mrrrrrrrrrf … I think it’s an accurate measurement of my current state of exhaustion that I would prefer to spend a full moon Cinco de Mayo Saturday fight-night in Las Vegas simply lounging around in bed with a room-serviced salad and fruit plate with plans of going to sleep early.

But I did manage to drag myself out (into the hallway) to take a few snapshots at least, now that I finally had a 10-hour day as opposed to a 17-hour one … the view is from the Aria hotel’s 32nd floor. Unfortunately, there were too many reflections in the window for me to block out completely (even with a scarf acting as impromptu hood over my head and as much huddling around the glass and camera as I could manage), but the lights are lovely nevertheless!

And I couldn’t resist throwing in the aerial scene of Las Vegas too - the last image was taken last year when I was flying back from Israel. The upside-down L-shaped darkness is Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport, and that short, thick line of lights just above and to the right of it is The Strip. It’s really amazing to think that the Strip is really just a tiny part of the whole of the city!

So, Light + Buildings is very, very interesting if very, very tiring. But there definitely be some hidden gems if one manages to keep walking and the eyes open! I took some snapshots with my iPhone - will post more later.

Here’s something I couldn’t pass up … my colleague says it’s an old, 1960’s carbon arc spotlight, and the plate on the end is stamped with the amazing name of “Super Trouper”. (The base plate says it’s supposed to be plugged into just a 110V supply!)

It made my little steampunk heart go pitter-patter. Of course I couldn’t resist taking an action shot with it.

The last picture is of a modern spotlight “bulb”, which is typically filled with high-pressure xenon gas, and can go up to 10k W. I’m told that people who change such bulbs need to wear “arterial shields” because if one of them breaks, it can send shards of glass spraying with such velocity that it’ll slice right into your neck. Eek!

It turns out Frankfurt’s Cathedral, or St. Bartholomeus’s Cathedral, is quite the happening place in history! At the time I was there, though, it was simply a REALLY REALLY neat place in which to play with a fisheye lens as you see. I wish I had gotten more exterior shots than the few from the distance like in the previous post, but oh well, a time and place for everything.

There will be more church-y pics coming up as yesterday I visited a monastery-turned-winery, but that’s it for now!

I made it to Germany with a minimum of adventures! \o/ (Alas, only minimum, and not a complete lack, but I’ll take what I can get!)

I only had 1.5 days free before work starts, but already have tons of pictures. The first half day I  basically wandered around like a zombie after 4 hours of sleep total in the last 48. My friend took me around Frankfurt, and I was instantly enamored by the cathedral in the distance amidst all the modern construction. The interior turned into an amazing kaleidoscope of geometries in my fishe-eye lens, as I’ll show in the next post!

In 2006, I took a trip to Victoria Island off of the coast of British Columbia, and with the wonderful cooperation of the Pacific Northwest Raptors, cut my teeth on my very first “real” digital SLR; the Nikon D200. It was also my first real exercise in large-scale batch editing (as I had promised to donate all photos I took to them for use as they wish in their promotion/marketing), and as a result, six years later, the folder holding my photos from that particular trip is still the messiest one on my server. However, in half-heartedly reorganizing some files in order to make some extra space on a hard drive, I pulled these two photos in particular.

The first is the Spectacled Owl, and boy was he a character. He was grumpy, he was a shameless flirt for scritches, and definitely had something out for the dog. I’ll have to find the series of photos where he got all huffy and puffed up until he looked like he had an afro.

The second is a juvenile Bald Eagle - I didn’t know till this trip that they didn’t achieve their full pure-white hood until they reached full adult-hood several years after hatching (so much for knowing anything interesting about my nation’s iconic symbol). The poor thing was molting around this time, and so was pretty sulky for most of my visit, but he nevertheless pulled off some moments too!

Weirdly inspired by this series of My Little Ponies art, I decided to experiment a bit too!

The column on the right has spatters in the background … since I’m working on the laptop with its really weird brightness/contrast settings, I’ve no idea if they show up at all or not on other folks’ screens.