Four years ago, I made the switch to digital SLR photography. The primary reason was the workflow. When I shot slide film, I would have to get the film developed, look at each image, scan the ones I liked, correct the color balance and then manually remove the dust spots from the scanned images. When I first got the digital camera, the workflow became: auto-correct the color balance using the Nikon’s color profile, then select the images I liked. Great! ...
K and I received our copies of the Yellowstone calendar and they look great. I’m happy with both the images we selected and also the printing - which was great. As I mentioned earlier, we went with Zazzle for doing the printing and couldn’t be happier. My mom got the ones for the folks in Louisiana and she also thought they looked good. But hey, your mom is supposed to think everything you do looks good, so I was even happier to see that someone I don’t know in Illinois bought a copy on the Zazzle marketplace. I didn’t expect that, but it was nice to see :-) ...
Time to assemble the annual Yellowstone calendar. This year I had a bit of a deadline (and not the shipping deadline this year!). The company I ordered from (Zazzle) was having a 44% off deal, which expires around 3am. Unfortunately, because of my grandfather’s death, I never did get around to processing the pictures from this year’s trip, so I didn’t have anything ready to go. Fortunately, it didn’t take that long to find 10… 18… 26… 28… 29 pictures. It took a bit longer to color correct and prune them back down to the 13 below: ...
One of our dogs, Darwin, likes sleeping on the floor. He’ll occasionally sleep on the couch or on his dog bed, but then he gets too hot and moves to the floor. The other dog, Sierra (named after either the Sierra Nevada Mountains as beautifully described by John Muir or the brewery named after the same mountains, depending on whom you ask), doesn’t get so hot and prefers sleeping on pillows or couches… my spot in the bed if I’m not currently occupying it, etc. One of her sleeping spots is on an old pillow in the bedroom. But apparently, it’s not always that comfortable. When we went to bed last night, this was the scene that greeted us. ...
They may take our rehabilitation bins, but they’ll never take… our FREEDOM! On Sunday, K release some baby water turtles that she had been over-wintering. Fortunately, we’re all of a mile from a good place at which to release turtles, Jordan Lake, so we didn’t have to drive too far. The big one in the image set is a male (note the long nails for better, um, gripping) slider and the other three are painted turtles (you can see the orange on the underside of the shells in the images in the gallery). ...
Last week (on Inauguration Day no less), we got about 7" of snow out at the house. I just uploaded the pictures this morning. Some of my favorites are below, the rest are in the gallery. If nothing else, the dogs sure did seem to enjoy the snow. :-)
Using a bit of leftover birthday money, I bought some new camera equipment. Nothing particularly sexy like a big long lens (what do you mean by homoerotic?). I bought a set of carbon fiber tripod legs that weigh about 3 pounds instead of the 6 pounds of my old tripod legs - that should make hiking easier. They can also hold more weight which is good since my biggest lens tops out what you should put on the old legs. I also bought a new tripod head. Instead of a ball head (ahem), I got a gimbal head that balances the weight of the camera so that you can easily point it anywhere and it stays put. Moreover, the new head is far more stable than the old one when using long lenses. ...
I started taking photography more seriously about ten years ago. I put down my cheap point and shoot film camera and bought an SLR body, a few lenses and some slide film. The great thing about shooting film (slide or print) is that you aren’t constrained by the quality of your camera. My first SLR was a used Olympus OM-1n, circa 1975. The OM-1n was fully manual - no auto-focus, no auto-exposure. If you didn’t want to use the exposure meter then you didn’t even need a battery. It was a beautiful piece of equipment, but it was also about as basic as you could get outside of a pinhole camera. It was a dark box that held and advanced film with a mount to hold a lens open for a set period of time. That’s it. ...
It’s okay to look, I promise that there are no shots of me doing naked cage construction. *shudder* A couple of months ago, K got a call about a squirrel. When the folks brought it over, it turned out to be rather small, but pretty far along in its development. Well, that’s because it was a flying squirrel. They tend to be a lot smaller, a lot sweeter and just darn cute. Because they live in colonies, K found someone with another flying squirrel and has been raising them together. They just recently went outside, so hopefully they’ll be releasable before winter. Here are some of the pictures from when they were still inside. ...
update: and for those that prefer a better interface, all of the pictures in gallery