30th June 2009: Ten hours on a flight between Hong Kong and Helsinki

I have during the last couple of days thought about buying a DSLR camera and two minutes before boarding the Sydney to Hong Kong flight last night that was exactly what I decided to do. Without the thorough internet research I know most of my (male, at least) friends would do (as well as the guy in the shop who did give me quite a patronizing look when I answered him that “No, I have not really checked out all cool features of this camera on the web”, when he asked) I had decided to go for the Canon 500D – purely on recommendation (by people who do not have this camera but love spending money on electronics) and my female instinct. (The latter possibly to be better trusted than the former.) So, I went into the shop, told the guy working there what I wanted, took the box without checking it (looking back this maybe was slightly risky, but it all turned out well. I think.), boarded the plane, put it in the storage space and slept for eight hours.

In Hong Kong I bought a memory card and as soon as I was seated on the Helsinki flight I started the mission of getting acquainted with my new friend. Now there are quite a limited number of things to take photos of on an airplane, especially if trying to avoid making unfriends by harassing fellow passengers while doing so. So I ended up taking landscape pictures of China, testing the focus points settings on clouds, taking portrait pictures of jet engines and waving my feet really fast to check out the shutter speed settings on moving objects. (When getting down on the floor to catch an interesting angle of my shoes people did start looking strangely, though.) I kept saying yes to everything eatable offered to me just to get new motives for my study and since I felt a little bad about not eating the food I had ordered I ended up much too full and feeling slightly sick.

Finally, somewhere over Irkutsk (where the hell is that?) I ran out of battery. I got a little more than half way through the manual. So, with this valuable opportunity gone there is a risk I will now never learn about white balance or lens peripheral illumination correction…