I took the camera for a walk down at Brush Creek late last night to see if it would see anything interesting. It did, and here are my results. I took my tripod with me and walked around looking like a big dork for a few hours. Unfortunatly, it turns out, the tripod didn’t help very much at all. I trashed probably 75% of the shots I took because they were all blurry. I can’t really remember now if I was keeping my hands on the tripod as I exposed the pictures, so I guess next time I just need to pay more attention.
My tripod doesn’t seem to be terribly stable, compared to others I have used. I imagine this is because I spent $49.99 and others have spent $200.00+. To get the camera up to my eye level, or even close I have to crank up the center post quite high (almost maxed, really) which detracts from the stability. So off to get a new tripod soon, I guess.
The walk along Brush Creek is really beautiful at night, if you can get over the smell. It’s a sewer, and it stinks sometimes. If you hold your nose though, it’s quite beautiful and there were plenty of couples peacefully making out on benches.
Right after I walked down onto the sidewalk I passed a bench with three girls chatting and smoking. As I passed, they said, “Please scare the rat away”. Now, I am like Mr. Suburb and have been most of my life. I don’t spend much time in cities, and even less near giant meandering sewers so I had a little bit of confusion over this. “Rat?” said I. They pointed and there, in all it’s glory, was the first giant city sewer rat I have ever seen in my life. I was pretty happy about it really. I’d never seen one and I’ve always read about “rats the size of small dogs” and so on. This one was more like the size of a large rat, but it was still cool and I said so. “Oh, cool!”. I guess they realized at this point I was not going to be their heroic savior so they switched tactics. “Take his picture!” and I said, “You know, I think I will.”
All my gear was still bagged up and such so I sat down on the grass to dig it all out. This of course scared the rat away so I guess mission accomplished. “You were too slow.” The rat ran right over to the girl’s bench and then took off down the sidewalk. They shrieked like girls should when a rat comes near them and I giggled and walked away.
As I am walking I come across an area where I can see the moon in the clouds and I think it looks great, so I stop to take some pictures. There is a couple making out on the wall 50 feet or so away, and I think they thought I was taking their picture. I felt a little weird about the whole thing but I couldn’t come up with a good way to tell them I wasn’t taking their picture without sounding like a fool so I just sucked it up. Some of my friends who are photographers have no problem taking pictures of people without asking, or seem to, but I am pretty shy and that doesn’t work for me. All in all, I bet if I had asked they wouldn’t have minded if I did take their picture, but I was just there for the moon baby.
The rest of the walk was pretty laid back and mellow. I really need to spend more time outside when the sun is down. It’s a lot more relaxing than sitting on IRC (irc.fazed.net, #fazed) and trying to make Unicode work in id3lib. At around 11:05 I stolled over to The Cheesecake Factory to utterly destroy my diet. After successfully communicating that I wanted a slice of cheesecake to the mexican girl cleaning up the cheesecake area she told me they were closed. “No more. No open.” Of course, people were still dining and presumably had the right to order desert, but whatever. No cheesecake for me.
So all in all, a nice night. The Plaza area was very calm and peaceful around 10ish, which probably everyone but me already knew. I probably should have left the camera at home though. It was barely worth it. So much to learn 🙂