A day at the Academy of Sciences

We've really been wanting to go to the new Academy of Sciences. The last few years we've seen specials on how they've built it, how the dealt with the animals during the transition and how they made it all happen. Talking with a friend last week she mentioned she wanted to go too so we made an outing of it. It was an exhausting day, so many people, but a lot of fun too. I haven't been there since I was a little kid on a field trip, it was totally different going as an adult. We didn't get there early enough to do the planetarium or anything that required separate tickets, they were all gone by the time we got there. But that was ok, there was so much to do even with out the planetarium. My favorite animal was the leafy sea dragon, unfortunately I wasn't able to get that great of a photo of the light sensitive creature. And as always love the jellies and the octapus was facinating.

I'm still getting used to my new camera. I do love it... I'm extremely happy I got it. It takes amazing pictures, and I have the option of eventually getting different lenses for it. I was worried about the learning curve, I've never owned a totally manual camera and I was really worried about learning f-stops and shutter speeds and focusing and getting it all right was going to be overwhelming (I don't know why, but I was intimidated) however it does have a fully automatic mode too, so there is a fail safe fallback. I've made a commitment to try take it with me as much as possible over the next year and use it as much as possible. I'm definitely still learning. All the photos of our day are on flickr here.