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.

Just for more fun.

Just for fun.

Before and after retouching examples -- just for fun.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.)