Breaking News!!!

There's nothing like waking up to the sounds of helicopters flying around your building.  Those of you who are aware of Montreal's crumbling infrastructure will understand me when I say that my original thought was that the helicopter was there to record the long lines of traffic caused by the latest crack that was discovered on the Champlain Bridge.  I turned on the radio expecting to hear about there being 10km long lines of traffic trying to get on all three of the local bridges, only to find out that the real drama was taking place just outside of my kitchen window.  Three activists were climbing the side of the Biosphere on Île Ste-Hélène in order to bring attention to the 30 Greenpeace activists who are being held in Russia due to their protest of the Gazprom Prirazlomnaya oil platform.  The 30 Greenpeace activists, known as The Arctic 30 are currently being held in a Murmansk prison.  One of the members of the Arctic 30 is a man by the name of Alexandre Paul, who is from Montreal.  Thus the reason for the activity at the Biosphere this morning.  The protesters have said that they will not come down until The Arctic 30 have been freed. Local police are on the scene but have said that they will not intervene since public safety is not in danger and that the climbers don't pose a danger to themselves as it appears that they "know what they're doing."  Since this was taking place just outside my window, well actually outside my window, across the highway and then the St. Lawrence Seaway, it gave me the chance to take a few pictures from the comfort of my kitchen.  I just took out the screen, opened the window and began snapping away.  Luckily, My Lovely Assistant had already left for work at this point because it was a rather chilly -3 Celsius, not including the wind, and she's not as comfortable with the cold weather as I am.  The first picture you see here is actually the last one that I took.  With there being such a great distance between us, I obviously had to dig out my telephoto lens.  It was take at f/5.6, 1/1000sec, ISO 100 at 300mm.  It then cropped it real tight so that I had a better view of the banner.  The second photo you see was the first one that I took.  On it you can see the three activists, in the orange jumpsuits, as they were climbing the Biosphere.  This photograph was taken at f/5.6, 1/640sec, ISO 100 at 300mm.  I didn't do as much cropping on this one because I liked how the photograph showed how large the Biosphere is compared to the little orange guys who were climbing it.  As I said at the beginning, there was a helicopter flying around overheard while all of this was going on.  I took that photograph at f/5.6, 1/500sec, ISO 100 at 250mm.  The final picture here is the same as the first, just before I cropped it.  Here's to hoping that this all ends peacefully and that nobody gets hurt.  I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

***UPDATE***
The banner began to come down around 10:00AM.