My girlfriend and I attended the grand opening event of Erin's Pavilion at the Edwin Watts Southwind Park here in Springfield on May 19. Southwind Park, unlike most parks, was designed from the beginning to be accessible to all people with special needs. Erin's Pavilion, the park's welcome and visitor center, is the park's main attraction. The event we attended served as a public open house for the pavilion, with guided tours, tram rides around the trails, speeches and refreshments. A privately funded fireworks show concluded the evening's events.

Springfield had been doused with rain for several days prior to that Wednesday's grand opening event. Luckily, the weather that evening was clear, perfect for a fireworks show. We took our cameras and got several shots of the pavilion and some nice shots of the fireworks show.

To shoot the fireworks, I mounted my Canon 50D camera on my tripod, changed to my EF-S 10-22mm wide-angle lens, set the shutter speed to bulb mode and attached my RS-80N3 cable release to the camera body. Since I've only ever briefly photographed fireworks before that evening, I quickly searched for photographing fireworks via my iPhone and found a nice, concise article on photographing fireworks via kenrockwell.com.

You can find out more about Southwind Park and the Erin's Pavilion grand opening event in these articles at the SJ-R:
Erin's Pavilion opens today at Southwind Park
Erin's Pavilion opens at Southwind Park

Check out our photos at the SmugMug gallery. The photos were shot by both my girlfriend and I.
 

Happy birthday, Billy Joel! To celebrate Mr. Joel's 60th anniversary of breathing and doing other things, Illinois' #1 Billy Joel cover band, Silly Joel, assembled once again, this time at the Hoogland Center for the Arts in downtown Springfield on May 1.

For this performance, many friends of the band dotted the packed hall at the HCFTA. The band members, who like their shows to be light-hearted and fun, celebrated keyboardist Virginia's real-life pregnancy by also being pregnant (even the men). Check out my photos and video from the performance below.

Silly Joel's talents are not consumed entirely by the works of Mr. Joel. Silly is also known to dabble into the works of artists such as Prince (or the artist formerly known as Prince) and more.

Click below to view the performance photos at my SmugMug gallery:

About the photos:

These were mostly photographed on a Canon EOS 50D with the Canon 100mm f/2.8 IS macro lens. The hybrid IS in the lens helped a lot when snapping these shots from my table with no flash.

About the video:

The video above was shot with a Canon EOS Digital Rebel T1i with a Canon 50mm f1/4 prime lens. Audio was recorded with the built-in microphone. Before leaving home, I grabbed that camera and lens as an afterthought, thinking it would be fun to experiment with concert recording. When I arrived, I was lucky enough to get a table at the front. The camera was sitting on top of my camera bag, so I didn't have a good way to pan to all the band members while recording. I could only move it between songs.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well the videos turned out. I took clips of many songs at a variety of settings. Some were shot at 1080 and 20 frames per second while most were 720 at 30 fps. The final version above was scaled to 720 at 23.95 fps.

The above photograph is of my buddy Ryan riding his bike in March. He and his brother were helping me complete a photography assignment I had from an intermediate photography class at the Springfield Art Association, taught by local photographer Sarah Chatham of NBP Studio. For the assignment, I was trying to illustrate speed/motion. After many attempts at the shot, this one turned out fantastic.

I'm posting about this photo because of a nice surprise I had April 21. More...

Hey! This happened back in February, but I'm just now writing about it. I'm a busy guy, after all ... yep.

In case you haven't heard, "The Big Lebowski" is a 1998 film, starring Jeff Bridges & John Goodman, about a couple of lazy losers who get in way over their heads in a story of guns, money and kidnappings/ransom all from a simple case of mistaken identity. If you haven't seen it, read more here. While it didn't do so well at the box office, it has since spawned a cult-like following across the world. Here in Springfield, devoted fans gather yearly at Strike 'n Spare West in February to celebrate this great flick with an event called The Lebowski Experience.

The Experience begins by closing down the bowling alley to anyone except attendees. The movie is shown, followed by team trivia for prizes. A costume contest and other activities are next. Drink specials are available during the entire event and door prizes are called out periodically. Unlimited bowling for all attendees follows, with the bowling alley re-opening to the public later in the evening. This year, entertainment was provided by the local band BüK.

This year marked my first TLE. My friends and I had a great time. I snapped some photos while there, so check out my Lebowski Experience SmugMug gallery below. You can also check out local coverage of the event in the online version of Springfield's Own Magazine.

Click to view the gallery:

Just a quick, fun thing to share here. I've been taking a look at backup software over the past week, trying to decide what to use to back up a few additional PCs I have. I've written about backup software before, but this time I'm looking for something that handles the network backups a little bit better than the Acronis home series.

One software product I began looking into tonight is Novastor NovaBACKUP Professional. I have never used it before and found it via some searching. One unique feature it has is the ability to run a file copy/synchronize between two locations without writing data to a proprietary backup format file. No other backup software I've been testing recently does that. The functionality is very similar to Microsoft's SyncToy.

I thought I'd throw the largest thing that I have at this feature, which turns out to be a 100-plus gigabyte archive of photographs I've taken over the years. The source was the photo archive on my Drobo S. The destination is a network share on an old server that I have. After setting the options, I started the copy, got up and let it run for a bit.

I would have loved to finish the test, but I don't think I have quite this long to mess around!

Now, to be fair to Novastor, the destination server is old (HP Netserver LH3) and has some problems with file copies over the network. I still thought four years to finish was pretty funny. Maybe Novastor needs to take a look at how they're calculating their estimates under less-than-ideal conditions. Would it have really taken that long? I doubt it, but I'm not willing to find out!

If you're as lazy as I, you may have been using the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) until just recently. Why just recently? If you're not in the know, Windows 7 was released for sale in October of last year. Before then, the RC was made publicly available May 5, 2009, with a beta version available before then. During the RC phase, it was well known that the RC version of Windows 7 was set to begin shutting down your PC every two hours starting on March 1. How time flies! A friendly reminder from Microsoft (pictured here) sparked the motivation I needed to kick start my Windows 7 release version installation. Time to get started. More...