La Cirque et Moi

La Cirque est arriveé!

I didn't know Cirque du Soleil was coming to town, but as I was leaving Baltimore today, I saw the striped, conical tents and detoured to see what was going on.

Now I myself would never attend a performance of Cirque; the snippets I've seen on TV scare the crap out of me. It all looks very postmodern and Frenchified to me.

Kind of like Cats on steroids.

Non, merci.

Blue Screen

My fabulous students from the Adult Hebrew class I teach generously gave me an Amazon gift certificate last month, and what I ordered with that gift arrived tonight - this nifty Dolica Tripod and Ball Head

So having this nice new tripod to play with, I thought I'd try it out with a self-portrait. The ball head made precise positioning of my Canon XSi DSLR much easier than with my cheapinski "Best Buy Special" tripod. I used a wireless remote control to trigger the camera for what turned out to be a six-second exposure. The resulting image didn't show any camera shake, so I'm happy (of course, there was no wind and no tractor-trailers passing by in my family room...)

It's a very nice tripod for the money - lightweight, of course, but the ball-head is very secure, the legs are individually adjustable for angle at the "hip," and the center column is reversable for down-low shooting... features not often seen at this price point.