And so it begins...

First off, apologies for the delay in posting!!! My trip started off with my two friends Lan & Byoung. I am super lucky to be traveling with these two because I get to experience flying in luxury. Byoung has flown 2 million miles and so he gets all these fancy perks! We got to hang out in the Admirals Club where we got to chill in style. You'll have to forgive me because I'm trying to post this with such enthusiasm but I have tons of things to say and I'm super tired. BUT I really want to post =)

On the plane, I found Lan and Byoung sleeping which is pretty funny with that guy in the background.

And its so cute because they were holding hands!!!

San Francisco is about 3 or 4 hours away and if you know anything about me - I can't sit still. So when it comes to sitting in uncomfortable chairs in a crammed space late at night - the only you want to do is not to sit still - so i stared at the window. Let me just say that it is extremely beautiful to look through a window on a plane at night. The stars are all out, the clouds are within reach, and the ground below looks like a circuit board. I really wanted to capture this with my camera but night shots in a moving plane present difficult challenges technically. I got a chance to experiment a bit and I wanted to show the results.

This first image is an obvious example of what happens when you try to shoot at night with no light to expose the image. On the right is the wing of the plane but you can't see anything else. Knowing this, I bumped up the ISO to 1600 and changed my aperture to make it as wide as I could. I change the shutter speed to stay open a little longer too.

Shot number two presented this image and so you can see a little more light coming through. I slow the shutter down even more. My hand isn't steady at all and the camera has nothing to focus on so I switch it to manual focus so that my lens doesn't waste time searching. I push my camera right against the window and control my breathing to be as steady as possible.

Image 3 comes as the above. A little more detail and those blue specks? Those are stars =) Results are comiong through.

I try again but this time I put my shutter speed at 30" right before BULB and...

Voila! Considering the circumstances I think this image came out pretty successful. I love how the image shows me actually holding my camera and the round circle of the lens sorta frames the constellations. The night sky was breathtaking but lets get real: cameras don't do justice to God's work.

Here's one image just to show the stars with the city lights of the ground as we were arriving in to SFO.

We rented a car for the weekend and something about the late night sky was calling my name. I literally snapped a bunch of images to show the mountains against this yellowish green sky but it was really hard to get an image I liked =( so you will all have to settle for this one instead!

We arrived around late midnight and stopped at Lan's favorite thai restaurant called Osha.

I was happy camper by the end of the night and the city was just so cool to look at! My eyes were darting all over the place just so I could catch a glimpse of everything!

Last image of the day: Chocolates on my bed.  And that's where I shall continue in a new post!