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.