Airshow by accident

Over the weekend we decided to take visiting relatives to Ghirardelli's Chocolate factory. It was my first driving experiment after surgery.

One mistake.. there was an air show in the city around the Pier area and that meant there was no way to anywhere near the Chocolate factory. After driving around for an hour and realizing there was no way to park anywhere close by, not to mention the "pee pee" calls from the kids, we had to make a hasty retreat back out of the pier area.

Luckily when we stopped almost close to the freeway entrance, the planes were still circling around and the camera was in the trunk!

Quickly mounted the 70-200 and clicked a few shots from the sidewalk. The wife was surprised by my impulsiveness but when we came home and she saw the photos, her jaw dropped..

"How did you take that one?" she asked.

Told her that support in buying the 70-200mm is much appreciated. When she realized that she was the proud financier of such worthy equipment, she was beaming!

Next year, we are going to the airshow and parking ourselves at a vantage location for photograph session!

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Bang on Target

More matching dresses, courtesy of the local Target store and the kids school for making their own "tie-dye" shirts..

Goes without saying that the kids will give me one good pose and one "kurangu" (monkey) pose for every photo shoot.. Apparently that is their norm.. the photographer just found out about this today.

They make great models. Was worried that the 5D has developed a focus issue of sorts but after cleaning the lenses and mounting pins carefully, looks like there are no big issues..

Whew!

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Portrait lens

Photography forums usually tout an 85mm prime lens or a 100mm prime lens as "the" portrait lens to swear by, but the 70-200 f2.8 L with the extender 2x ii gives me amazing sharpness and fantastic Bokeh even in cloudy situations..

The little one posed for me a few minutes ago (originally brought the camera out to catch the backyard squirrel jumping off the trees but it proved too difficult for a hand held shot and that brought out the model) and junior joined in briefly for a shot..

This lens is so cool that I am having issues deleting shots off the hard drive to save photos! Want to keep every shot.

Tomorrow evening.. Hornets! Found a nest near the front yard and two big hornets. Will see how they pose..

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Arrival of the Extender

The 70-200mm f2.8 L was to be accompanied by a Canon EF 2x ii Extender which is actually a tele-converter that makes the:

70 -200 f2.8 into a
140-400 f5.6

It did not arrive with the lens before the long weekend trip but made its debut today.

Tried it on some usual subjects in the backyard and it is fantastic.

A shot of the backyard baby squirrel with the lens set to 200 mm (equates to 400mm zoom)..

Very happy.. no, make that ecstatic!

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Palm Springs - Long weekend trip

We went to Cabazon to see the life size stone dinosaurs and followed it up with a trip to Palm Springs over the Memorial day weekend.

There are over 800 photographs to check and edit and after an almost non stop drive back yesterday was too tired to even wake up and go do Yoga this morning.

Did a quick glance through all the photographs for one good snap to share for this post and here it is..

There were 4 hummingbirds outside the kiosk on top of the Palm Canyon parking lot. Two of them were doing aerial acrobatics and Kissing? Was lucky enough to get this shot.

and yes, finally got the 70-200mm f2.8 L to close out the camera bag! This picture was taken with that lens set to 200mm.

There are some really cute pictures of our own two hummingbirds, which will be posted later!

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