Chinese Lantern Festival

Anne, Joan and I finally managed to make it into the Lantern Festival at the Missouri Botanical Gardens tonight. I brought my Canon SX40, my medium grade camera, but I also brought along a tripod.  Anne and I had fervently tracked the progress of this show through its construction phase. We had seen it many times since during the day and saw it at night during its opening week. This is the festival’s final week, so we were pleased to finally get in to see it again in the dark. Folks, there are only six days left. 

It was sold out again tonight and before nine the crowd was rather annoying, but after nine there was a magic hour. Most of the people had left and the sky was fully dark. I plucked one promising photo from tonight’s treasure trove for this post. I can’t wait to fully delve into tonight’s haul.

A shoutout to James and his lovely bride, Sara, who happened to be in the gardens tonight too. Hauling about this tripod must have put me in the 1% of tonight’s camera hauling crowd, because a woman with a Verizon tablet device asked me, “Do you know anything about cameras?”

I didn’t even know that Verizon sold a tablet and for my money a tablet is not a ‘camera’. You all know how I feel about the iPhone as a camera. At least the iPhone has a better camera than the iPad. God knows what a Verizon tablet’s photographic capabilities might be. Anyway, she had inadvertently locked the camera App so that she couldn’t take anymore pictures.

I poked at her screen. Don’t try this at home folks, because I am a trained Computer Scientist. Anyway, I got no more joy poking at her screen then she did, so I fell back upon that tried and true IT technique, reboot. She liked the idea and I took that opportunity to escape into the crowd. I saw her later in the night and ask if that suggestion had worked and it had. Take that you retiring Car Talk guys.