EMONG'S JOURNALS

What better way to celebrate the Chinese New Year 2016 than visiting the world's oldest Chinatown! On Monday (Feb 8), the Chinatown district in Binondo, Manila practically shut down as people from all over the metro and nearby provinces celebrated the Chinese New Year -- the Year of the Fire Monkey. As always, the color red dominated the locale. Participants in parades and floats featured the Fire Monkey, the theme of this year's Chinese zodiac sign. Some of the parade highlights include elaborately decorated floats, school marching bands, stilt walkers, lion dancers and exploding firecrackers. Dragons and Lions The green lion dances to the entertainment of the crowd along Ongpin Street. The green and yellow lion join the blue dragon to enter establishments in the Binondo District to give good luck. In return, owners of the shops give "ang pao," those red envelopes containing tokens or cash. Teener dons the lion headgear to start the dance... ...

W anted to do more than your street photography? A new full frame DSLR camera from Nikon allows you to shoot for the stars -- literally! Nikon had just announced the new D810A, its new gear meant exclusively for astrophotography. The new model is based widely on their existing D810 model but equipped with more features and gizmos to make it the best astrophotography tool. The Nikon D810A comes with the same 36.3 megapixel full frame Nikon FX format CMOS sensor used in the D810 but will not include an optical low-pass filter. It will have Nikon’s latest and greatest image-processing engine, EXPEED 4. For its astrophotography, the D810A is built with a specially made optical filter that enabled ‘beautiful reproduction of vivid reds in images of nebulae that emit H-alpha light. Nikon claims that this optical filter is capable of four times greater transmission of H-alpha light than the one used on the regular D810 model. Other upgrades include a a long-exposure manual (M*) mod...