Cobra Helicopter

A Cobra helicopter on display at the Reno Air Races.

Coffee Day

So I started my day with a 4 shots of espresso Americano  at Starbucks. When that was gone I had a cup of coffee from the Keurig and now I have this going.

I think I am starting to wake up now.

Fall Is In The Air

Fall is quickly approaching and with it is fall colors. It is a good time to get out and get some colorful images as well as some family portraits. Over the past few days I have been looking over the images I have done over the past couple years and playing around some more with a few of them, getting an idea of what has worked for me in the past and what has not as well as what type of images I like the most.
This is an image I took up in dog valley 2 years ago.

Another thing coming up is this years Air Races and I have been playing with past images from that as well. These two are of a couple jets that had just landed and will be moved over into the static display.

Business Portraits

Recently I did a business portrait shoot for an accounting firm. As many companies have these days they started a Facebook page for their firm and needed a portrait of each employee to go along with a short bio on each person. Overall we did portraits for 19 employees, it was fun getting the staff to relax and enjoy getting their picture

Horses and Marmots

Went out in the middle of the day today to see about taking some photos of the wild horses. Not the most ideal time of the day to try and take photos of wildlife (if you consider the horses to be wildlife) but then it was more of an exercise of getting out and taking some photos while I had free time and seeing what I could come up with for the conditions. It was super windy out today also and that made it slightly more challenging to keep the camera steady with a larger lens on.

 After checking out the horses for a bit I drove over off East McCarran where there are some fields and there were marmots all over the place so I pulled off along side the road where I saw one near the edge of the field to try and get some images of them. They are real skittish so most the time they just took off for their burrow but I managed to get a few of this guy sticking his head out.

Software And More Software

Adobe released their latest version of Lightroom yesterday and though I don't have any previous versions of it I downloaded the trial version to get a better feel for it. Currently I use a different setup for processing files (view NX2 and Capture NX2) and for the most part it works for me but like any program after awhile you like to see them bring out a new version of the program with new and improved features. With the programs I am currently using they have released the typical updates over time however have not released a new version in around 3 years now.
Both Capture NX2 and Lightroom 4 have features I wish the other had. I think overall Lightroom 4 is a nice program and I like the way it works slightly more than Capture NX2. Just not sure if it is enough to justify the cost when I do have a system I use in place already. The nice thing Adobe did though is the Cost of LR4 is about half the cost of what LR3 was when it was released originally.

The above image is one from last fall that I pulled into LR4 to play around with and get a feel for the program. Still figuring out the best way to do stuff in this program so we will see how I feel after the 30 day trial is up.

It Is A New Year

Seems like I have slipped on posting new stuff here. Well with the new year and all maybe I should make a resolution to.........wait no....I am not really into that whole thing. For the most part I think I should do things because I either need to or want to and I should start no matter what time of the year it is. Not to say anything against anyone who does do them because ultimately making a choice to start doing something that improves ones quality of life is a good thing and if the start of a new year is something that works for you then that is great and you should definitely do it.
One thing that is nice about the new year is that it is a good time frame to look over to see what all was accomplished in the last year and set goals for the next year. For me that is slightly different than resolutions which are usually about making some type of change in your life, where this is more goal setting to build upon certain things I already do (maybe this makes a lot more sense in my head but hey I do photography not writing) . One thing for me is I can look back across the last year and see that I have had the opportunity to do much more portrait photography than in previous years and my goal for this year would be to do much much more than the last year. There are several other things I need to work on and get better at doing as life moves forward but I will not bore you with all that.....at the moment.

So all that talk about doing portraits this last year and the first photos I am going to put up this year are Architectural. The Architect I used to work for designed this building  and wants some photos of it so I went out the other evening to take a look and take a few pictures of it. Theses were taken just after the sun went behind the mountain, so there is still a lot of light in the sky and it also provides for nice even lighting.

So there you have it my first blog post of 2012!