Wouldn’t Mind Some Rain

While we’ve gotten much more rain this year than in past years, we could use more. I’d love to see the sky go black, hear some good thunder, and feel the rain coming down again. During one of our spring rains my daughter and I had lunch at the Whole Foods mother ship (as we sometimes call the headquarters) and walked around downtown Austin in the rain. I went monochrome, super contrasty, and dark/moody with this shot of my daughter walking along Lamar Blvd. For most of our walk I had to keep the camera put away — too much rain — but we had a lull here.

Memorial Day

Many have given their lives for our freedoms…I’m grateful.  War memorial at DKR Texas Memorial Stadium at the University of Texas.

Dark Down Below

Stairway to nowhere…looks kind of eerie down there.  HDR of an outdoor staircase in Snohomish, WA.  One of many random(ish) shots I took while my wife was enjoying a massage in town.  In keeping with my view that many HDR guys (and gals) go too far and bring out too much detail in the shadows, I tried to process just enough to give a sense of what’s down there without bringing it out completely.

One If By Land, Two If By Sea

All I could think of when I saw these two conversing on the street in Boston: “One if by land, two if by sea! C’mon, lady, how hard can this be to remember?!” Heavily cropped, but not much processing on this photo otherwise.

Pike Place Market

Pike Place 50mm, f/2.8, 1/100s

A recent picture of two of my girls strolling in Seattle’s Pike Place Market.  Looking forward to getting back to Seattle soon.

Tulips 50mm, f/2.8, 1/160s

I loved the contrast between the blues in the windows and the oranges/yellows in the flowers in the next shot.

More Flowers 50mm, f/1.4, 1/3200s

Peppers 50mm, f/2.2, 1/160s

I liked the possibilities in the next shot but didn’t execute it very well.  The water and buildings made a cool backdrop through the windows IMO.  I used manual mode and stopped down to f/14 to get a lot of depth of field and used a shutter speed fast enough for my shaky handholding yet slow enough for flash.  It was a dark place relative to all the light streaming in the windows so flash was a must if I was going to keep the rainy mood in the background.  I had no way to get the flash off-camera and bouncing didn’t work well so it’s not a lot better than a point-and-shoot.  I’m sure I could have improved it with some effort but I didn’t want to stretch the girls’ patience too thin.

Portrait 50mm, f/14, 1/200s

Candid Baby Girl

Smile 105mm, f/4.5, 1/20s

Most of our family’s favorite pictures are candids like these.  While at the dinner table our daughter was being cute as usual and the 50D was just sitting out from having been used for these pictures of a fawn.  My 70-200mm lens was attached and while I was tempted to open all the way up to f/2.8 (love the bokeh) I stopped down to f/4.5 to keep a little more depth of field in the portraits.  The toughest part, as always with a wriggling baby, was focusing on the eye and taking the shot before she moved out of the plane of focus — which was 2″ at the wide end of the lens with this body/lens combo @ f/4.5.  I had mixed success but the shots we ended up with are fun.  Exposure, contrast, vignette, and noise reduction in Lightroom…

170mm, f/4.5, 1/30s

I Want That Cup!!!  70mm, f/4.5, 1/45s

The Fawn

Fawn 85mm, f/5.6, 1/180s

The kids found a fawn in the yard today.  I wasn’t home when the fawn was discovered and arrived at the house to find my 7-year old son on the phone with a rancher friend asking what we should do.  He told us to leave it alone but send him a picture.  We slowly approached and took a few shots.  The fawn wrinkled its nose a bit but other wise ignored us even when we were in arm’s length…seemed sick or something.  However, a couple of hours later the kids reported that it was running around the yard.  All was well.  Oh yeah, photo processing was mostly hitting the Auto button in Lightroom.

Fawn 150mm, f/5.6, 1/180s

The Heavens Are Telling The Glory Of God

200mm, f/32, 1/80s, ISO 100

We went out to watch the eclipse with another family tonight.  I lugged the camera and lenses out just in case I wanted to get pictures of the kids with their funny eclipse glasses, etc.  At first I didn’t bother to get it out and just snapped iPhone shots of the kids but on a whim I decided to play around with pictures of the eclipse.  While the sun was high I started with f/32, 1/8000s with a polarizing filter (just to close down two more stops) and even then the sun was completely blown out.  As the sun neared the horizon I was able to remove the polarizer, open up the shutter a bit, and get a silhouette of the horizon and some color in the sky.  Not bad for just fiddling around on a whim.  An improvement might have been to open up the aperture to a point where the lens tends to be sharper but once the sun nears the horizon around here it drops like a rock so I didn’t bother with that…I just kept clicking the remote here and there to capture different stages of the sunset/eclipse.  Processing was spot removal and noise reduction in Lightroom.

Thickly Settled

iPhone shot…no idea what the settings were.

In the burbs around Boston I occasionally came across a “Thickly Settled” street sign.  It struck me as rather funny and while I expected that it had something to do with it being a more crowded residential area, it really was meaningless.  After all, I could see with my own eyes that I was in a residential neighborhood.

I looked it up and found all sorts of humorous comments about this and other street signs.  “Slow Children” elicited a comment along the lines of “When I see a Slow Children sign I always wonder how all the slow children all ended up living in one neighborhood.”  The best I can gather (I did not bother to dig into the MA government sites to verify this) is that the Thickly Settled sign is an indication to observe a speed limit of 30 mph even if it is not posted.  I’m not entirely sure why they don’t just post the speed limit itself if they’re going to bother with putting up a sign at all.  Maybe I’m wrong about all this…

On a semi-random note, I’ll give a shout out to Enterprise Car Rental since you can (barely) see the hood of my rental in the picture above.  I typically rent from Hertz through my company.  I have Hertz #1 Gold which allows me to bypass the rental car checkin. Having #1 Gold means I just show up in the Hertz garage, find my name and parking spot on the display, and the car is waiting in that parking spot with the keys and paperwork in it, ready to go.  Pretty convenient.  This time my admin set me up with Enterprise which was only $17 per day for an “intermediate” car.  I arrived at the Enterprise counter in Boston sometime around midnight and after checking in asked if I had any choices regarding cars.  The agent asked what I drive at home — a 4×4 crew cab pickup truck. Upon hearing that she said that since it was midnight I could pick anything in the lot at the $17 price, but mentioned that the sweet, black 2012 Chevy Tahoe might be best suited to my tastes.  True enough…nice!  Especially nice because I had added some personal time to my trip and was paying some of the days out of my pocket.  I’ll pay $17 a day for a new Tahoe anytime.

Happy Mother’s Day

Happy Mother’s Day to my mom (pictured above), who doesn’t get on the internet much and probably won’t see this anyway  I’m not one for lots of sappy words on the internet so I’ll just say that I love her and I appreciate her greatly.