Icarus, etc.

I flew too high, too close to the sun.  I didn't have wax wings, but they were destroyed by the hubris of heights, the awesomeness of altitude.  Also they were betrayed by the malice of monofilament.  I broke my kitestring, while flying my faithful kite up in the air above Golden Gardens park in Seattle.  Sadly, the kite flew itself out into the water (the puget sound) and also the camera (and my beautiful new slider set-up before drowning in the picture) were dropped from on high down into the depths.  It was a pretty sight, and no doubt will make a good video, should it ever be recovered, but it came down like a meteorite.  Gravity is quite effective.  So I lost all my stuff.  The next day (yesterday) I went to Glazier's Camera shop in Seattle to buy a new GoPro, since I am out one.  I ended up spending almost 1000 bucks.  Oops.  Luckily, my companion in kiting, The sage that I learned my high flying camera work from, Danny, was near a kite store (in Ventura, CA) where it is possible to get the same kite I flung away, and so I have two coming my way.
 I still need to rebuild my slider rig.  It used the most cute little pulleys you could ever see, tiny little things that cost 15 bucks a piece, and then there was a piece of the fishing rod that I use for flying the kite.  And a nice gopro mount that I will miss.  I'll make another one.  I have two of the pulleys still, and I'll find some piece of lightweight rod to make it around, but I still think I can do better than this.
Ok, enough of that.  I'm mostly through with my break this time around, but I have a few more days.  In the past two weeks I've been out canoeing and hiking in the North Cascades, and I got to see some Cedar Waxwings.  (see picture) On that trip we also went up to see Nooksack Falls, a beautiful waterfall on the Nooksack River up from Bellingham.

 So when I went to the camera store yesterday, I got myself a new lens, a 35mm lens.  I've been believing that I need this kind of a lens for a while, so here I am trying it out.  This one is a video lens, and it has some cool features, it is made by Rokinon, and has these little gears for adding focusing externally.  It is a Manual focus Lens, and is also manual aperature.  Maybe I won't like this as much as I think, but I am happy with it for now.  Here is a picture of some technology juxtaposition for starters....  The captian of the Orion busy with navigation...

 This lens is F/1.5, so that means it is super wide in the pupil, and if you ever went to the eye doctor and came away with those funny sunglasses after because they gave you dilating eyedrops, you understand that you can't focus on things.  This is because you have a huge aperture, and lenses with huge apertures have really narrow depths of field, which means that only a tiny bit is in focus at a time.

 It is a neat effect, so I took some pictures on the docks...