Beads, beads and millions of beads

This weekend was the annual Empty Bowl event at the Egan Convention center. It's a fund raiser for a local soup kitchen. Artists from around the state donate handmade bowls, and a 20 dollar ticket gets you a bowl and all the soup and cornbread you can eat. My family went along with probably a couple thousand other people.
The Egan center, which is the smaller and older of our convention centers has a gorgeous art installation inspired by the Aurora Borealis called "Beaded Sky Curtain" by artist Jeanne Leffingwell. Millions of strung beads emulate the beauty of the Northern Lights.
I had my HS10 so I took a couple photos. The new HS20 is available for pre-order now. I really really want it. I've loved my HS10 so much. I know I keep talking up my camera, but I love it's zooming capabilities and how easy it is to use. No lenses to fuss with. I'm dropping hints starting now for this camera for my birthday to my darling husband. Big not at all subtle hints like "I would really love to have this camera which is 500 dollars and available at Amazon for my birthday"
I re-sized the full images to 25% for faster loading, then cropped down the 100% images so they would be smaller so you could see the full detail. Click on the images to see them at a larger size. The first one is with no zoom from where I was standing, the second one is zoomed in close.

The cropped images

Yeah, it zooms that much. Manual zoom and I used the auto-focus, so non-photographers can actually take good photos straight out of the box.

More beads-

Posted a shamrock project at Beadwork at BellaOnline.