Friday, August 7, 2009



My wife and I went to a family barbecue and one of the kids there asked, "Did you see the nest?" We went over to the porch where they pointed, and sure enough, there was a nest with three birds (no longer babies, but not quite grown yet) in it. I did not have my camera with me. So we went around back and I asked my brother-in-law if I could borrow his camera. He didn't have a wide aperture lens (it was a Rebel xs (I think) with a kit lens), so I had to shoot with flash because even though it was daytime still, the nest was in shadow. The moment I took the picture, the three birds (who I had assumed couldn't fly yet for some reason) disappeared in a flurry of frantic flutters. Fortunately, the one shot I got off was not too bad...even the on-camera flash not casting shadows too horribly.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Friday, July 17, 2009



Just for more fun.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Friday, July 10, 2009

Thursday, July 9, 2009





Before and after retouching examples -- just for fun.

Monday, July 6, 2009

Wednesday, July 1, 2009



At d-land, on a stormy day, we're walking along when all of a sudden hundreds of crows take off from somewhere. It was awesome and eerie. I tried to capture it, but really, needed a wider angle lens on the camera. I was shooting at the time with a 70-200 f/2.8 IS. This picture is actually a composite of a few different shots. Whereas the picture is faking how many crows are in it, it actually represents the experience better because there were undoubtedly this many crows in the air, I just didn't capture them all in a single, good shot.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Friday, June 26, 2009









These photos are credited to Steve Hardman with post processing by me. I wanted to post them here though because they are of some of my guitar students at a recital when I was teaching guitar and they're fun.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

My wife asked me to post the picture I use under the blog header so it could be seen clearly. So here it is:



This was taken in a practically pitch black room with an f4 lens (widest I had at the time) the shutter set to 30 seconds and the ISO all the way up (I think 3200). It was still pretty dark so I had to boost it after the fact and then applied noise filtering. Other than that, it's unaltered. It's an interesting photo I think. Particularly in the fact that it doesn't really look like a photo but like an impressionistic painting or something. Kind of fun.




Did a puppy photoshoot for my mother's new pug a few years back. We were playing around with the blocks and then someone decided to use my napping father in the letter-block adventure. Of course I couldn't help but snap a quick picture of it.



Someone commented that this looks like a picture of young moms (Though, whereas one of them is like 10, that would be pretty scary). I wanted to point out that not one of them was a mother in this picture. These are all aunts or cousins (or sisters, in the case of the younger one) of the babies.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Monday, June 22, 2009

Sunday, June 21, 2009



This picture was a quick snapshot with a point-and-shoot camera right after my wife cut all her hair off. It was a nice picture, but is pretty heavilly photoshopped to add the 'glamour' factor to it. The kitchen she was in wasn't the best background for it, so I added some light and then blew the highlights of the picture so only her face came through, then did the standard glamour retouching, etc., etc...

Saturday, June 20, 2009



I always kind of prefer pictures that are candid. This one isn't necessarilly candid (someone yelled, "go crazy!" just before it was snapped - so it's more of a posed madness than a candid shot), but I still like it better than all of the traditional 'everybody-say-cheese' ones that were taken.








85mm f1.2. What a lens! All taken sans flash. The first one's a bit fuzzy (and I added a texture to it to 'art' it up a bit more...though I must say it's my least favorite of these. For some reason we never got a good one of her this time around though.)