Snowy Hike

Beth and I went out the other day to central Nevada to see if we could fill my tag, however we could not find any deer.While we did not find any deer we did enjoy the hiking we did in the area we were in. The mountains were covered in a couple inches of snow and the views were really nice. One canyon we hiked up had aspens that were on the tail end of their fall color but the colors against the white snow made a nice contrast. These are just a couple of the images I took that day while we were out.

Fall Colors

Been pretty busy dealing with sick kids around here but I was able to get out last Sunday morning for a bit to photograph some fall colors. For these I went up into the Dog Valley area where I knew there were some decent Aspen groves. I am hoping I will be able to get out some more before all the leaves are gone.

39580

Our church does a community service project each year where they get the different Life Groups (home fellowship groups) from the church to sign up to clean up trash from different areas along the highways here in town and the different parks. This year the focus was on Pyramid highway and the parks in the Sparks area. My morning was spent driving around to a few of the different groups to get photos for the church to use. At a few of the spots I took a photo of the trash bags to try and show that aspect and every time I did I kept thinking the people driving by must think I am crazy taking photos of trash bags. You never know though, the bright orange might make for some nice color splash in the living room! 

Last Chance Creek

This is shot up Last Chance Creek that feeds into Frenchmen Lake. Took this while I was out on a walk with the kids.

Sacramento Zoo

Yesterday we took the kids to the Sacramento Zoo. Had a good time checking out all the animals and the kids were able to touch a few like a big python, a turtle and a lizard as well as see an owl and a Red Tail Hawk up close. Of course I took several photos and these are just a few of them.

Photo Walk

This last weekend I went on Scott Kellby's World Wide Photo Walk. Photo walks are usually just a group of people that like photography, with skill levels varying from beginner to advanced, that choose a location to walk together spending time taking photographs. So they are a good time to get together and hang out with others who share a common interest in photography. This particular walk is set up by Scott Kellby's company and the idea is to have walks going all over the world on the same day. I think this is the 3rd or 4th year they have done this and every year I think about going on the local one here but up until this year had yet to do it, so this year I went ahead and signed up to go. For the Local walk here in Reno we walked around the area of the UNR campus surrounding the Quad. Maybe it is my background in working as a drafter in Architectural offices for years but I really like the architectural details of the buildings there, especially as they have several older brick buildings as well as a couple more recent modern buildings. The hard part for me was a lot of the detailing I would see that I liked was kind of high up and any way I could see to photograph them was at an angle I would not really like. One thing I was able to get was some of the windows and openings in the brick buildings and I really liked how the Ivy was looking on these buildings surrounding the windows. I also really liked the bright red fire hydrant with the nice green leaves as it's backdrop. The other good thing about a walk like this is finding images and exploring compositions for what the area might offer and that provides good opportunities to maybe look at things in a different way than you normally would to create an image. Even though I took several classes at UNR I never really spent time in this area so the other nice thing was walking the area to see the possible locations for doing portraits.

Forgotten Photos

The nice thing about digital is that we are able to affordable to take a lot more images as the ones that do not work out we just delete and there is no money lost on developing. The other nice thing about this is that it also makes it easier to learn techniques that we might have shied away from a bit with film if we could not afford to develop film just to see how it worked out. On the flip side I find myself shooting more and therefore end up with a lot more images I want to play with and when I don't have time to mess with them right away they sometimes get forgotten about as other projects stack up. These images for example were taken in July during our trip to Oregon. I did edit a few images from that trip and even printed several that are hanging in the house but while I was looking threw some of my folders looking for images to add to the digital frame I realized there were still several images I wanted to edit from this trip. I also know there are other images further back that I intended to come back to an have yet to do so. So every now and then I will go back to older stuff and look threw images and work on some.