Interview with Po

So Po came buy the other day and I had a chance to sit down and talk with him about how things have been going lately.
Me: So how is it being the Dragon Warrior?
Po: It has been great! I have really earned the respect of the others as they now see the potential I had all along. Monkey even forgave me for eating all his cookies......though he did find a new hiding place for them!
Me: How are things in the kingdom? Any new enemies lately?
Po: No big ones. A few small time foes that thought they could take on me and the others but failed miserably. I think a bowl of noodles has a better chance of taking us out lately!
Me: Speaking of noodles are you still making noodle soup for the rest of the gang?
Po: OH YES! They love my noodle soup so I can not get away from making it several times a week.
Me: Well Thank You for sitting down with me Po. It has been great to have this chance to talk with you.
Po: Oh it was my pleasure, you are my favorite interviewer!
Me: Oh well Thank You for the kind comment!
Po: Would you like some noodle soup?
Me: Yes I would love some!

Well it was a fun interview and now I am off to practice the Wuxi finger hold!

Dog Portrait

So I guess the kids got tired of being my subjects and I had to move on to making the dog pose for me. You can tell it was real rough for him having to lay there on his pillow and all but he managed. Took several different photos, I was actually surprised he stayed there as well as he did, I guess after 7-8 years he is finally starting to settle down a bit!

Back Lit Fall Leaf

After photographing some solo leafs the other day on a solid black back ground I though this also might make a good opportunity to photograph them back lit so the light filters through the leaf and really lights up the colors in the leaf. To do this I put a piece of Plexiglas spanning across the back of two chairs, then I put the leaf on top the Plexiglas and the flash on the seat below pointing up at the leaf. Then from above I took the picture and this is what I got.

More Fall Colors

This is another shot from the day I was out with my dad a few weeks back. Took this over between Truckee and Sierraville. The grove of trees we were in were at their peek and the yellows were really nice and bright.

Wild Horse

I took the girls out last week to an area where there are usually several deer hanging out in a field so that they could do a little wildlife viewing. After checking out the deer I noticed a few wild horses up on the hill behind us so we drove up the dirt road a little ways to get a better look. After checking out the three horses we first spotted I notice this horse further up the road and decided to get a closer look. With the way this horse was standing in this photo his body was mostly shaded so I did some shadow enhancement in my post processing to get more detail in the shaded area of his body. The kids had a good outing day as after we watched the wildlife for a bit we headed of and walked through the car museum.

Fall Leaf

I had wanted to try to do more of a close up picture of a solo leaf with a totally black background, so yesterday when were were out I grabbed a few leaves to start working with on this. The leaf was held by a clothes line pin that was attached to a stand, then I framed the shot so you would not see the clothes pin. I had my flash about 3 feet off to the right with a snoot on it, something like this but for mine I used cardboard. Basically the snoot allowed me to have the light mainly hitting the leaf and nothing else, so between that and a dark towel I had further in the background I was sure to get the solid black background I wanted. The other thing I did was to place a piece of vellum drawing paper in front of the flash to filter the light and give it a softer look.
I have seen this type of photo done in the past with flowers and I would like to do more and put together a series of a few images together.

Fall Colors

Last weekend when my dad and I were out photographing fall colors I came across this little brook running threw a grove of the aspen trees, at least I think they are aspen trees as I honestly don't know the difference between aspens and alders. I thought that it might make for some nice photographs, all I needed to do was find an angle that did not have to much of the bright light coming straight into the scene as most the area was in this nice diffused light as it was filtered threw the leaves of the trees. These are 2 of the photographs I took in that location. I really like how the green moss on the rocks looks. I will post a couple other fall color pictures later on.

The Stump

I was out taking pictures of the fall colors and came across this stump. I thought the lines and tonalities in the wood would work well for a black and white photo, therefore, in the post processing for this image I did a simple black and white conversion and this is the result.

Galena Creek Park

Went up to Galena Creek park last week to try and photograph some fall colors. Several trees in that area already had the leaves gone however there was still some stuff to work with. These are a few of the photos I took that day.

Old School Light Meter

I have a small collection consisting of a few old cameras as well as a couple old light meters. This one, a Weston Master light meter, is probably the older of the 2 as from what I can tell this model was produced from around 1939-1945. I also have an old Sekonic L-86 "Auto-Lumi" that I believe was produced around 1963 - 1978. I was looking at them the other day and was curious about how to use these correctly and though for the most part they are not to difficult to figure out there were a couple things about them I was wondering about. After searching the internet I was able to find a site that had PDF copies of the original manuals so I could look over the original instructions and after that I gave them a try. From what I can tell they seem to still work pretty good but may be off a stop or so but I need to try them out some more in different conditions like out side in better light. Not that I would ever use them and when I do need a light meter I use a more modern Sekonic L-308B that I bought new several years ago but it is interesting checking them out and knowing how to use them. The other interesting thing I found was the Weston Light meters were one of the brands Ansel Adams used especially before spot meters came about.

Apple Me

2 blog posts in one day! You may have seen this on my facebook page as well but I figured I should post it here also since I did some setup for this photo. This was something my kids decided to make me to show their appreciation of their teach, who is me as I home school them. So Beth helped them make this wonderful likeness of me, well maybe a little to much hair on the head! For this photo the apple was sitting on a piece of white foam core and another piece standing up behind for the background. The flash was pointed straight up with a diffuser dome on it, so you get some light from the side, and their was a reflector above it and the apple to bounce light back down from above.

Mushrooms on a Tree

Well we don't seem to have to much for fall colors around here yet but I did go ahead and drive up to Galena Park to see if any of the trees were at least starting to change colors and so far they are still pretty green. I am thinking in the next couple weeks they will be showing some nice yellows so hopefully I will get some photos then. If it works out I may go down to Bridgeport Sunday afternoon and stay the night and try to get some photographs of fall colors down there.
That would bring us to these two images. While I was up in Galena walking around I was looking for some other photo opportunities and one of the things I came across was these mushrooms growing in a couple trees. Not sure that I have seen this too much but I thought they might make some nice subject matter. As the sun was still pretty high in the sky I filtered the hard sunlight with a Photoflex 12" translucent LiteDisc to get a much softer light. I had to handhold the camera as I had left the tripod at home thinking I would not need it and this was one outing where it would have been nice to have it......oh well lesson learned.

Smoke Take 2

So this is the second time I have played around with doing smoke pictures. The photos from the first time I tried this were posted here and here . The method I used to take the pictures was approximately the same however this time I had a desk lamp to one side to light the smoke just so I could better focus on it, then the main lighting came from my flash set up to the opposite side. It does not show to much in this photograph but I need to get some black cloth for a background to absorbe the light that hits it better than the painted black paper I was using. Once I had some photos I uploaded and chose this one as it was the most interesting to me. Once uploaded I did a bit of post processing to it by adjusting brightness, contrast, colors to give it a cooler blue feel, sharpness, cropped and stamped out a few bits of smoke that I felt were too distracting. The result would be this image.

Glass

I have tried this type photo in the past but was not that impressed with the outcome of those shots. After reading on another site about doing these type of photographs I wanted to give it another try. The biggest thing I took from this other site was to light the background. According to this photographer by lighting the background you will not get all the ugly reflections that you get when you light glass from the front and the light bouncing off the background will light the glass. So for this photograph I had the glass sitting on some white Plexiglas, white foam core behind and I bounced the flash off the foam core. I like the look the light gives by passing threw the subject, especially the colored water. I think I still need to work on the setup to get it a little bit better, plus there are some other things that I would like to try like placing the glass on black Plexiglas.

More Blue Angels at The Reno Air Races

Here are a few more photos of the Blue Angels I have taken over the past few days at the Air Races. One of the days when Rachel saw the 4 jets flying in a real tight formation she said "daddy look they are all stuck together" HAHA.

Reno Air Races

Here are a few more photos I took while out at the Reno Air Races this week. The 2 prop driven planes were shot with a shutter speed of 1/200 sec. for the Breitling plane and 1/250 sec. for the Rare Bear plane so that I could get some blur on the prop. An even slower shutter speed would give a better blur on the prop however I would need a lot more practice to get some pictures that are not totally blurred. Rare Bear is one of the race planes and I believe it holds the course record for a prop driven plane at almost 500 mph.
The Air Force plane I believe is the C-17 Globemaster IIIs. They did a pretty impressive demo in that aircraft. Part of the demo was to show how fast it comes to a stop upon landing, very short distance for an aircraft of that size. I believe this was also the one that climes pretty fast at takeoff, mainly for when they are in battle zones this enables them to get out of range of enemy fire faster.

Blue Angels at the Reno Air Races

Today is the first day I went out to the Reno Air Races. The kids and I were only out there for a little bit however most the time we were the Blue Angels were flying around. I believe today was the first day they were flying at the races and from what I understand today is the day they mainly fly around spotting land marks to help them know where they want to be, line up, turn, etc. during their air show. Even though they do a lot more technical flying during their actual show they seem to be up in the air longer today as they get everything figured out. So these are a few photos I captured while they were up today.

Sunflower

As the sunflowers have progressed along I have taken a few more pictures of them at different stages. The bottom photo is one of the smaller flowers a couple days before it opened. The middle photo is the one that I had previously posted and now has all the pedals open. The top photo is the same flower a few days latter, you can see it's progression as the center increases in size. I have been thinking that I might put together the different photos at different stages together in a frame to hang as they should make a nice series of photos.

Sunflower

This is one of the sunflowers we have growing out back. It is the first one to start opening up. You can see not all the peddles have opened up yet. They make for some nice color in a photograph with the rich yellow of the flower, especially with the green of the other parts of the flower and the blue of the sky. I plan on taking some more photographs as it progresses along.

Pumpkin Plant

The pumpkin plants are growing really well and looks like we will get several pumpkins from it. The leaves are pretty big and interesting so I thought they would make a nice black and white picture.

More from the Spaghetti Squash

I did another picture of the Spaghetti Squash in our garden. This time I wanted to get mainly the leaves of the plant. Once I had the image in my photo editing software I did a black and white conversion to the image and applied a "green filter" effect. The nice thing about digital black and white photographs is the ability to apply the colored filters when you process the image on the computer. If you were shooting film you would need the filter in place on the lens.

Spaghetti Squash Plant Flower

There are several flowers on my spaghetti squash plant now. I went out this morning and took a few pictures of them. I used a macro lens to get this and the flower was in shade so I used a reflector to bounce some light back onto it. I had to have the camera on a tripod and compose the picture then while I was holding the reflector I used a remote to trigger the camera. Maybe I should try using a kid stand to hold the reflector next time!

More Steller's Jay

This is another photo I took of the Steller's Jay when we were out camping. The shutter speed was to slow to freeze the wings as the bird was moving so you end up with this blurred effect on much of the body. It was a totally unintended look but I thought it looked pretty cool. ***By the way, in case you don't know you can click on the picture for a little larger view.

Flower on a Light Box

I was doing a little experimenting with back lighting a flower by setting it on a light box. With a subject that has a little bit of transparency to it you get a nice effect with some light filtering through the subject and a nice white background.

Steller's Jay

This Steller's Jay was photographed a couple weeks ago while we were camping up at Eagle Lake, just north of Susanville. We lured it in by tossing out some peanuts for it to come get. We took several photographs as we tossed a peanut out time and time again for this bird to come back for and by the time we were done there was 3 or 4 of them coming to get there free lunch.

WATER DROPS

Another blog I read had a post about photographing water drops and the pictures looked interesting so I thought I would give it a try. I had a container filled with water sitting on the kitchen counter then over it I hung a zip lock bag with water in it that I poked a small hole in to provide dripping water in a constant location. Next was to set the camera on the tripod and focus on the spot the drops were hitting and then take several shots trying to time it just right to get the drop impacting the water. I also had a flash set up just to the left pointed at a piece of foam core behind the container so it bounced the light back at the drops from behind. The blue look is from changing the in camera white balance to incandescent lighting. Then a little bit of typical post processing and some cropping to get the images above.

Snow Flower 2

Here is another photo I did of a Snow Flower when I went out again a couple weeks ago. There were a lot more popping up this time and I had a macro lens with me so I tried a little more of a close up approach on this one.

Snow Flower

One morning while the girls were getting their schooling with Grandma Poole I went for a hike along Galena Creek. The Snow Flowers were really just starting to poke out of the ground and this was the largest one I saw that day. I am hoping to go up there again maybe next week and see if I can find more to photograph.

Here are a couple close-up photos of a moth we found in the backyard today.

Doves

Probably everyday we have some doves hanging out in the back yard so I figured I would see if I could get some decent pictures of them. The hard part is getting close enough to them, even with the 500mm lens I had on, to get a decent picture. It also helps if you can keep the dog from running out the door as soon as you open it!

More SMOKE

These are a couple more images that I did last night.