IMG_2428.CR2: 30D, EF 85mm 1:1.8 @ 1/80, f/2.8, 1600 ISO, with bounced flashSaturday was a bowling birthday! Not my birthday, but a group of us got together to celebrate a friend’s birthday and we did so with bowling. It was great fun. Of course I brought my camera along, but regretted it because I figured some of the more serious players in nearby lanes might be upset with the distraction caused by the flash. I needn’t have worried because as soon as I arrived, I saw it was disco bowling! The photo is misleading in that the white light in the foreground was my bounced flash. Everything but the pins were lit by black-lights. You can just imagine how the bowling shoes looked! And it wouldn’t be disco bowling without loud disco music, right? Serious bowlers wouldn’t notice my flash amid the other distractions.

Speaking of the photo, the pictured little girl was quite a shot. Yes, her throws would sometimes take a minute to get to the pins, but she had an uncanny ability to hit pins with her second and third throws. Of course the first is easy when the gutter-guards are up, but the last two aren’t a given. You can see the #4 pin falling over in the photo. You go, girl.

I managed a 144, 148, and 138 in the three games we played. Jessica pulled a 204 out of her hat while claiming she didn’t know how the heck she did it. I think she’s a closet bowler or something. And no jokes about the difficulty of bowling in a closet!

Out of curiosity, I turned to Google to find out what a perfect score is. It’s 450, but this wasn’t the most interesting thing to come up in the search. To my great surprise, five-pin bowling is a uniquely Canadian game. I had no idea. This is yet another reason I couldn’t possibly move to another country…