Ever since I put up the bird feeders (and even before that) I’ve been trying to get good shots of the cardinal.  With my Sigma 120-400mm and some patience I was finally able to succeed.  These guys are really skittish.  If I come outside when I see them, they run away.  So I need to already be standing out there for them to ignore me and come out and let me take their photo.  This photo has been increasing in views rather quickly.  I’m a pretty big fan of it myself.

Rather than pile up my daily photos whenever I forget to post them, I’ll just post them one at a time and build up a stream of photos.  I haven’t been in much a textual blogging mood recently.  Perhaps that’ll return eventually.

Whenever I’m in Oahu, I love eating at this ramen joint.  If your only experience of ramen is cup o’ noodles, you haven’t had real ramen.  Check it out next time you’re in a heavy Japanese neighborhood.  This place has good price and service and the food is pretty filling - especially if you get the rice and dumplings.

It looks like the theme is cake.  Along with Kayla and something MS is famous for.  This cake, by the way, was made by Dina.

I was looking at my flickr 20 most interesting photos and I realized that a healthy portion of them were taken this year.  Six of the top 20, in fact, were taken in 2009.  Here they are:

I took this photo with my cell phone while I was in South Florida for my cousin’s wedding.  It was just on a whim because I wanted to show some of my family what had changed when I wasn’t looking.  Below is what I wrote on the description on flickr along with a little more exposition:

This is from last weekend.

When I saw this guy in a Georgetown cigar store I knew I had to photograph it before the day was over.  On the way back to the train, I captured this shot.  It creeps me out, but I had to capture it.

For my cousin’s wedding I wanted to have a f/2.8 lens.  I had had bad luck with my current lenses at Richard’s wedding because I couldn’t get good enough low light performance.  So I decided to rent a Canon EF 24-70mm L f/2.8 lens.  So not only will it be an f/2.8, but it will also be an L lens so this should be the best quality photos I have ever taken.  After a lot of looking around, I ended up choosing Pro Photo Rental.