A couple of signs

I thought somebody killed the electric car? You just don't see many of them today ... especially enough to have their own parking spots. At least there's a convenient power outlet on the wall for the electric car. Actually, this is a leftover sign on a building that used to be used by the power company. I just thought it seemed funny.
I also saw the sign below at a library. It for some reason just struck me as funny. No "light" studying allowed, I guess.

Zucchini and Squash

Misty Morning

There was some pretty heavy fog out this morning, which made for a cool looking sunrise.


I also grabbed the photo below a little later. It's the fog in the trees at Central Park in Ashland, Ky.

Full Moon

Beautiful full moon last night. It was so bright at one point, it looked like a light was on outside our house.

Awww.... nuts

This guy was hanging around feasting on our dinner leftovers at Central Park in Ashland on Wednesday.

Mercedes

Not my car ... I tinted the photo blue because I liked the effect better.

Toy Story cake

My wife goes all out when it comes to our kids' birthday cakes. Here's her latest creation. It's Andy's bed from the Toy Story movies. The bed itself is four layers of cake and the painting on the fondant icing is done with food coloring. The headboard and footboard are made of chocolate and the blocks are rice krispie squares with icing on them. The rug next to the bed is also made with fondant icing.

Ghost Roasters

I shot this Saturday night using a 15 second exposure. It's some kids around a stove roasting marshmallows. What I thought was neat was the light coming from the top that's lighting the grassy area above the wall. It looks like sunlight, but it's actually just from a street light. I sat the camera on a short wall, and the ghostly images come from the kids moving in and out of the frame during the exposure time.

Inside Rainbow

This is from the bouns room in our house. There was a CD laying upside down on the desk, and the sun reflecting through the skylight made this cool rainbow effect on the wall.

Old Truck

I see this old truck sitting on a street in Ashland near my son's daycare all the time, so I finally stopped and snapped a photo of it.

Pirates!

While on vacation, our cruise ship made a stop at Disney's Castaway Cay (pronounced "key") and there was the actual pirate ship used on the set in the film Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man's Chest. You can see more of the vacation photos by clicking here.

I didn't know they still made these things

First, sorry I haven't posted in a while, but I've been on vacation ... a real vacation in which I left the PowerBook at home. I'll post some more on that later, but for now here's a little something I saw at the hotel we stayed in at the Cincinnati Airport ... an actual cigarette machine. I didn't even think these things were legal anymore, seeing as how any kid could walk up and put his money in and get a pack of smokes. But, there it was.

Church Silhoutte

From a wedding I shot this past weekend.

Cone Flowers

This is actually two views of the same shot, the second one is just cropped a lot tighter to bring out the details more. They are cone flowers from my yard.

Thursday Night Storms

I tried my best to get a good lightning shot of some storms that rolled by Thursday evening, but this is the best I could come up with. I basically tried a few different approaches, first shooting in Aperture priority mode and craking the aperture up to 22 so the shutter would stay open a really long time. This produced the blue tinted sky effect in the first photo. Next, I just switched to all manual, set my aperture to 5.6 and my shutter time for five seconds and tried just shooting and hoping something popped up in that time frame.

Angles

I had thought about posting this as a mystery photo, but the fluorescent lights pretty much give it away. It's an awning on the front of a local grocery store, but it's a good example of lighting color temperatures. The camera is balanced for the fluorescent light, so it looks white and the color is accurate. However, the blue looking part at the top is the front of the awning that is lit by the evening sky. It's actually a brownish color, but the evening skylight gives it a bluish tint.

After the storm

We had a pretty good storm roll through Monday evening, which made for a really nice sunset afterward.

Tiger Lily

I know I haven't posted in a while. Sorry about that. Anyhow, since I like shooting flowers so much, I decided to create a gallery of just those shots on my main web site. Hope you like them.

Still, even more flowers...

If it weren't for flowers and the sky, I'm not sure I'd have much to put on here :-)

Blogger problems

I would have posted yesterday, but I kept getting this message

Yet another sunset

Here's a shot of the sunset from the other night. I've found a really good Photoshop technique for enhancing silhoutted sunset photos for anyone out there who cares about the technical end of this stuff. It's really simple, too. I copy the background layer that is the original photo, then change the blending mode of the new layer to multiply. This really makes the colors dark and bold. If the effect is too much, then lower the opacity of the new layer to tone it down some.

Pink Rose

Close Encounters

What happens when your backlighting is too bright and you expose for the foreground? Here we have direct sunlight coming in from the window behind my son. I thought it looked like the scene from Close Encounters where the aliens first come off the ship.

Ohio scenery

I had to go to Jackson, Ohio, yesterday, and there are some pretty neat sites along the way. I didn't really have time to stop and shoot stuff, but here's a shot of a barn I grabbed from the (moving) car.

Photo Tip No. 68

... make sure your camera strap isn't hanging into the frame. You'd think this would be obvious with digital cameras that use LCDs nowadays to show you exactly how your photo will look. In fact, the Fuji F10 that I have did away with the viewfinder completely to make room for a larger LCD. Still, I don't even use that sometimes, as in this case. I held the camera down to get a really low angle and just trusted my autofocus and fired off a few shots. I liked the exposure and composition of this shot the best ... minus the camera strap of course :-)

My other camera that I use is a Nikon D100 digital SLR. I have lots of people ask me if they can use the LCD on the back of their digital SLR to see the photos before they take them. The thing is, with the digital SLR, it's pretty much impossible because it works just like a film camera with a shutter that opens, exposes what it sees onto a chip behind the shutter, then stops when it closes ... therefore there is no way for the chip to "see" what it is about to take. The tiny point-and-shoot digitals that most people use have chips that are more similar to video cameras, therefore they can do a "preview" of what you're about to shoot.

That's probably more long and rambling than anyone wanted to read, but just thought I'd throw it out there.

Sunday Evening Sky

Pastoral scenery

A scene near a subdivision just outside Grayson, Ky.

Attention to Detail

Found this guy buzzing around a flower at my mother-in-law's house in Greenup County.

More flowers ...

Both of these are from indoor flower arrangements.

Fountain at Night

Wisteria update

Good news, I found my USB cable. Here are a few shots of the wisteria in my yard that is an update to this post. They're coming along very nicely.

Finally, a new post

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, but things at work have been crazy. It's finally calmed down, and I had all these pics I had taken recently I had planned on posting, but I can't seem to locate the USB cable to my camera this morning. So, here's one that I had previously downloaded. A while back, I had complained about getting stuck on the road behind this guy. I now realize things could have been worse, as I could have been stuck on a two-lane road behind the guy below.

Sunset

...from last night.

Tree, Cloud, Sky

The Fuji F10 that I use has a neat chome feature that bumps up the color saturation, which works really well on greens and blues. Other than cropping, this is how the color of the above photo looked straight from the camera.

More funny signs

I know they're cramped for space, but you would think they could come up with a better abbreviation for Methodist. Maybe calling it the Meth church will attract a whole new crowd?

Flowers

Sorry I haven't posted much in a while. Been a little busy. Here are a couple of flower shots from my yard. The first one is a close up of a daisy, and the second is a wisteria plant that hasn't bloomed yet.