Just a couple thoughts

Cold Air + Camera:  Yesterday I wrote about taking pictures in cold, snowy weather.  Latter I realized that I left out a very important point about shooting when it's very cold outside.  Never, never (strong enough?), bring your cold camera directly back into the house.  The warm, moister air in the house will condense all over the surfaces (inside and out) of your digital camera.  Since most of the surfaces inside your camera involve electric circuitry, this can do very expensive damage.  The 'howto' avoid this is simple.  Take a ziplock bag (or two) with you when you go out shooting.  Before you come back into the house (or for that matter, into your warm car), put your camera into the zip lock bag.  Now with a big DSLR, you may need a very big zip lock bag, or need to break your camera/lens down into 2 separate bags.  Try to squeeze as much air out of the bag as possible.  The air in the bag is a lot dryer than that in your house (cold air can't hold as much moisture).  Once your camera returns to room temperature, you can take it out of the bag.

Race Cars: One of my short term goals for the readers of this blog is to convince them to look at photos of other photographers frequently.  With this internet thing, you are able to look at the pictures of some of the best photographers in the world ... for free!  If you check out the right panel of this blog, you will see that I list some of the blogs that I read on a daily basis.  Those blogs are by some of the photographers that I often try to imitate the techniques that I see on their sites.  So, today I would like to introduce you to such a pro photographer, Jamie Squire.  He recently photographed the Daytona 500.  You can check out his photos from that event here.  While you are looking at some of his photos, ask yourself how he managed to get some of his shots.  Look down to third row of photos at picture #79816105.  How do you think he managed to get the foreground blurry and the cars in sharp focus?

Celestial Opportunity: Tomorrow night (Feb 20th) there will be a Total Lunar Eclipse.  A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon passes into the earth's shadow, blocking out the sun's rays. Now the moon won't be completely dark.  In fact, it should be light by some sunlight bending around our planet and should appear orangish to reddish.  This will be our last opportunity to see this kind of event till 2010.  According to the Meteorlogists, there is a good chance we might get to see it.  So get your cameras out and see if you can get a good shot.  If you do, post it to our flickr group for all of us to see.