Reno Air Races

The Air Races started yesterday so the kids and I took a drive out there today to have lunch with Beth. Thought we would just be there for lunch and leave figuring not much is happening this early in the week, however with the planes and jets up doing practice and qualifying runs today and not much of a crowed it turned out to be a good day to do some shots. With the old prop planes I wanted to work on getting the prop to blur as this makes a much better shot with these planes as when the prop is frozen from using a high shutter speed they look like they are ready to fall from the sky. This shot I was pretty happy with as it was shot at shutter speed 1/100th of a second while hand holding a 500mm lens. Typically you want to shoot with a shutter speed number higher than the focal length number when you hand hold the camera. For example with the 500mm lens you really want to shoot 1/500th or faster but if I do that the plane prop will not blur like I want, so I have to break the rule and lower the shutter speed. Needless to say I deleted A LOT of files after. I came home with 790 shots and have already reduced it down to 207 shots and I will probably eventually delete several more out of that. I was able to play around a bit today and got it figured out that when these old WW2 planes are going full speed I can still get a bit of prob blur at 1/320th increasing the amount of files I will potentially keep. One thing with this picture though is the prop pretty much disappears which may be to do with the way the light was hitting it but I am still pretty happy with how it turned out.

Very Tasty & Very Messy

We went to the Rib cook off yesterday and had some Very tasty ribs from a couple different places and as you can see by this photo they were also Very messy!

Ugly

Okay, came up for a U word......Ugly...as I do not really care for spiders so they are Ugly! This one was hanging out on the girls play house out side so I got a few pictures and then the spider......well.....it ran into my gloved hand and it did not survive. Poor thing, well it lives on in this picture.

Flowers

While we were at Tom and Ginny's last night I photographed these flowers they have growing in their backyard. The over cast skies made it nice for some diffused even light.

Taking Time

Today we took Time to go have a picnic at Lahontan Reservoir and do a little swimming. Beth had to drive out to Fallon this afternoon so we went with her then after we drove over to Lahontan and let the kids play in the water for a bit and had a picnic dinner. This is a shot of the dam at the reservoir, I just thought the building looked interesting.

Black and White

We went for a drive out to Crystal Mine today and dug around the rocks a bit. On the way back out I stopped a few times to photograph a few different flowers and these plants. I am not sure just what they are but I thought they would be good for doing some black and white conversions. The lines created by the leaves and the tonal range of the scene is something that works well with black and white photography. I liked playing with this one and I have a couple different shots from this spot I will probably do the same with as well as I will have to make it back to this spot sometime to get some other angles and compositions.

Strawberries

These Strawberries became the subject of my S photo. I like the way the red stands out on the white plate and background, I have also seen some nice images done with strawberries either splashing into a bowl of cream or cream splashing onto them. I decided for my shots I would keep it a bit more simple and not as messy this time. (click on image to view larger version)

This last photo is to show what we must do with the strawberries when we are done.....eat them!