Have been really good.

Last night, I pulled off an amaz­ing video record­ing gig at the NAC. It was packed, with the crowd spilling out to the foyer. There were so many peo­ple around me that I felt alone. The din was like some­one drag­ging their fin­gers down my spine, and it woke me into a sort of con­scious­ness. I turned on. Introduced myself to peo­ple. Waved to those I knew. Got lost for a few hours. It felt good to be get­ting paid for some­thing I love doing, and also some­thing I com­pletely taught myself to do.

It was this gig that afforded me a new Manfrotto 501HDV tri­pod head. It can sup­port my Canon 5D Mk II + 24–70mm lens with­out any tilt creep (a HUGE prob­lem I have now), and can lock into a sin­gle axis of move­ment. It also has a coun­ter­bal­ance sys­tem to com­pen­sate for a huge range of weight, whether it’s my 2.6kg DSLR or my feath­erlight Canon HF100 cam­corder. To go with the head are also a set of 745XB tri­pod legs which have a 55mm lev­el­ing ball so I can eas­ily level my cam­era with­out adjust­ing the legs, and it goes as low as 31cm. I’ve been using my cur­rent, crappy, bro­ken tri­pod for as long as I’ve been into pho­tog­ra­phy. I can’t even count how many times I’ve cursed it when I lost a shot due to bad tilt locks or uneven legs. My new one is being deliv­ered on Monday and it’s so sexy, I can’t guar­an­tee it won’t end up against my penis at some point.

In between yesterday’s late night, talk­ing John through a cri­sis at one in the morn­ing, and a cat who some­how always ends up sleep­ing exactly where I want to roll over, I tried to get as much sleep as possible.

Today, I went to the first of a two-part astropho­tog­ra­phy work­shop at the School of Photographic Arts Ottawa, which I signed up for in January. It was the first time I’ve paid for any kind of lessons related to pho­tog­ra­phy; I tend to find it straight for­ward enough to learn on my own, but when com­bined with astron­omy (which I knew noth­ing about), I def­i­nitely felt like it would be worth pay­ing some money to fig­ure that out. I have absolutely no plans on get­ting into com­mer­cial or pro­fes­sional astropho­tog­ra­phy, so this course was entirely for myself. And as expen­sive as the fees were, it was totally worth it, because it felt like 50 years of expe­ri­ence were crammed into nine hours.

I’ve always wanted to get into astron­omy (even before pho­tog­ra­phy) and even­tu­ally move onto astropho­tog­ra­phy, but I never had the time or the resources. I hap­pened to get an awe­some instruc­tor, who’s involved with astron­omy in every pos­si­ble way in Ottawa even though it has noth­ing to do with his day job. You can tell he has a huge pas­sion for it just from hear­ing his expe­ri­ences about cap­tur­ing dif­fer­ent celes­tial bod­ies (and the fact that he stud­ied in the astro­physics pro­gram in uni­ver­sity). One stu­dent asked if he’d ever been to NASA, and his eyes lit up as he nod­ded, and said, “More than once”. He even applied to be a Canadian astro­naut and made it to the third round.

So I also got a whirl­wind tour of the uni­verse, and learned tons of shit I never knew like:

  • The word “planet” is Greek for wan­derer. That’s cause the stars are always in the same posi­tions, rel­a­tive to each other, but the plan­ets move around.
  • Black holes don’t fol­low the laws of ther­mo­dy­nam­ics because they’re only the size of a pin­prick, which mean they have a huge mass with tiny vol­ume. Their char­ac­ter­is­tics reach infin­ity, so any kind of cal­cu­la­tions involv­ing black holes are like divid­ing by zero.
  • The only rea­son we see sun­sets is because of the way light from the sun reflects off the atmos­phere, which makes it curve. Otherwise, sun­set would be immensely shorter, last­ing only until the sun was out of sight. “True night”, or when the sun’s light can’t be seen any­more, is defined as when the sun is 18° below the hori­zon (and not-coincidentally, is the best time to be shooting).
  • The first pho­to­graph took eight hours to expose in 1826. The sun shines on the oppos­ing sides of two pil­lars because the expo­sure was so long that the sun had shifted from one side of the sky to the other.

I also learned the brass tacks of using a cam­era to take pic­tures of the the night sky, which is insanely com­pli­cated, because it’s like another order of mag­ni­tude in terms of the extra things one has to take into con­sid­er­a­tion when try­ing to pho­to­graph some­thing. But I finally under­stand it now, and maybe just as impor­tantly fig­ured out the lim­its of what I can do with my cur­rent cam­era and how much it would cost to get the type of shots I want.

There are only three stu­dents in the work­shop, so it was a lot of good inter­ac­tion. I went for lunch at Bridgehead with one, and found out she’s a pro­fes­sor of reli­gion at Carleton U. She under­stood all the expe­ri­ences I related to her in my jour­ney to fol­low Taoism, and got my Taoist jokes (Why don’t Immortals tell rid­dles? They don’t know the answers. Hah!), which is prob­a­bly why we got along so well. How fun it is to be able to talk Taoism with some­one and not have worry about bor­ing them.

So after an exhaust­ing but stim­u­lat­ing 10 hour day, I’m finally back, and I’ve been pig­ging out on junk food cause I deserve it. I also deserve a night off, so I’m totally tak­ing a night off. I’m also so tired it feels like it’s 12:30, but it’s only 8:30 now. Tomorrow, I have a Tai Chi uproot­ing and quiet-standing work­shop, with a large chance of feel­ing even better.