My journey through photography.
Before we took everything down for the year, I wanted to get some detail of one part of our tree. This angel ornament is actually one of four on our tree that were purchased by my wife’s grandmother in 1923. They’re small and, as you can imagine, quite fragile, so they have a special place at the very top of the tree, above the ornaments made by Hallmark and by various kids through the years.
I hope your Christmas holiday season has been as mine this year. Here’s to a great 2010!
My wife and I are in Leavenworth, Washington for a few days before heading home to get ready for Christmas later this week. We took in a production of “A Christmas Carol” at the local theater, and later tonight stuck around for the lighting ceremony. This is quite a popular event, as you can see by the throng of people gathered down below. My best guess is that several thousand were downtown tonight.
This is a shot that could have used a tripod, but I didn’t have it with me for this one. I used my 50mm wide open (f/1.4) with the ISO set to 400. As it is, I was only able to get about 1/50 shutter speed, barely short enough for handholding. Although not perfect, I’ve decided that it’s better than no picture at all, and I did want to get a shot of what we saw tonight.
Temps were around the mid-30’s at the Portland Saturday Market this last weekend, but that didn’t stop the musical performances from going on as usual. This happened to be a jazz group, and we also came across a steel drum band and a one-armed guy playing blues guitar and harmonica at the same time.
Well, I’m back.
For those of you who don’t know, my camera bag was stolen a few weeks ago, on Oct 31, to be exact. Every single piece of my photo gear was in that bag. I’ll post the details at some point, but the good news to all of this is that it was covered by my homeowners insurance. I’ve been able to replace everything.
I did upgrade one piece significantly, and that was to a Canon L-series 70-200mm f/4. With all of the busy-ness of the holidays this week, I haven’t had a ton of time to experiment with it, but I did step out on the back porch yesterday and get a shot of our fountain girl who keeps tabs on the pond. She’s looking quite weathered these days, and I was amazed at the detail this L-series picked up. The original, unedited 12M version is simply incredible when viewed at 100%.
Needless to say, it feels good to be back in business again. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what else I can come up with this new lens!
Another 6×12 print candidate. I did an HDR version of this shot a while back, so I thought I’d take a look at it again for this project. Taken south of Kent, Oregon.
A straighter, cleaner version of a shot that I’d tried earlier. I found some oddly-sized 6×12 frames a while back, so I thought I might try to go back through my shots and see what might work and what won’t in those dimensions.
I was driving on 97, about a mile north of Kent, Oregon, and I looked to the east and spotted this herd of elk running parallel to the highway, a few hundred yards or so away. Needless to say, I pulled over immediately and grabbed my camera. I barely had time to put my 75-300mm on and flip the Burst Mode switch. I only noticed later that my ISO and aperture were still set for some shady conditions I had just shot in. My adrenaline was running so high that I didn’t check those little details! Unfortunately, this is about the best shot of the bunch. I’m guessing there were 50-60 in this herd, and you can see there are a few bulls in there.
Not to post the same thing twice, but this one is going on my 24″ monitor at work. If you’re in the area, drop by my office at school and see how it looks in that size at that resolution. I’ll make this available for download on my photoblog if you’re interested.
