Piles of Cameras and Mountains of Gear

The entire Last Shuttle team is in Florida and getting ready for the launch of Discovery this week.  The weather is perfect, and so far the news out of NASA is very positive. 

I was happy to see that my parents found the old set of Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo NASA mission patches that I had hanging on my wall as a kid.  These are the original, old-school ones from the 60s & early 70s.  I forgot about the oversized Apollo patch.  I bet that's quite the rarity!  I don't think I've seen another one like it.  

We finally got together as a group in the afternoon, and WOW, could we have any more equipment piled up?  We have just under 20 cameras and too many lenses to count.  It'll be interesting to see if we can keep it all straight by the time we're done. A few of us have traded cameras and lent lenses to each other.

Here's an interesting combo.  Jook has taken a Nikkor 8mm circular fisheye lens and stuck it on a Canon 5D Mark II.  We are going to place this setup very close to the shuttle, knowing that we'll get a very interesting perspective of the launch.

I stuck the 8mm lens on my 5D Mark II and went out into the hotel hallway to show you the crazy circular view that you get.

And here, sitting among the lenses and camera bodies, is a shot of the hand-held 3D camera rig that Bob built.  We'll have some fun with that as well.

Tomorrow we'll be placing our cameras around the launch pad!  More to come...