2012-04-23

A wilting tulip petal - looking oddly enough like somebody's tongue :)

Tree bark than has seen better days, as seen in Green River, NB

With the arrival of Spring, welcome flies and bugs...

Among the first plants to get "spring back to life" in early Spring...

Even though it doesn't really look alive, these plants are busy growing and taking in  the Spring sunshine.

The home of wasps from last Summer: obviously a vacant home now.

A tree that has not bounced back to life for many Springs now - as seen on my father's wood lot behind my house.

2012-04-06

Today, I was able to borrow my father's 70 - 300mm lens (67mm diameter).  Quite a few notches above my standard 18 - 55mm lens. I had a lot of fun with it tonight!

The extra "zoom power" allowed me to get much closer to the moon and create some interesting shots.

As the moon was coming up behind clouds, there was an interesting "glow" that showed up.  I only have one or two shots of this before it disappeared.  Glad the exposure was just about right, I otherwise would of ruined these!

And here is the best full moon shot I've ever taken yet.  Would be nice to have a 700mm lens to try again, but the 300mm certainly made a huge difference compared to the 55mm lens I usually have.  In fact, I'd say it's not really useful to try unless you have at least 300mm in my opinion.

2012-03-17

This is one of the snails that is in my 10 gallon fish tank. 

This is another snail in the same tank.  Taking pictures of the tank proved to be more difficult than expected.  I'd really need an external flash to make sense.

My beloved (by cranky) the White Crown Tail Beta.

Abstract shot of bubbles running on top of water... tinted with color to make it more interesting...

2012-03-06

I managed to get my hands on Adobe LightRoom 3 recently (birthday cash + $200 off sale = new software for me!)  Here are my first processed images with LightRoom (instead of Google's Picasa)...

Here's my son Caleb, with his interesting Lego creations... Was conservative with effects on this one...

Here is my daughter with one of her Lego creations... I played more with the effects on this one (a blend of a downloaded preset and my own tweaks).

This is an image which I actually posted in my last blog update.  Seems like LightRoom has more options to offer to process the images.  Conversion from my Nikon D60 RAW files is definitely much superior to Picasa.

This was also a previously posted image.  Noise reduction in this one and colors were also much superior to Picasa.

For this one, the noise reduction was incredible!  This image was taken using ISO400 and was very noisy in Picasa.  I was able to manually tweak noise reduction settings until I get a very smooth and clean image.

Overall, LightRoom is very nice for processing RAW images.  I however don't think I will use it to REPLACE Picasa.  I actually think Picasa is awesome for image management and organization.  I think I may keep LightRoom for post processing images that I want to print or post somewhere.  LightRoom was a good buy for me at $90 instead of the regular $300.  Thanks to very kind photography hobbiest for letting us know about the sale!

2012-02-29

It's a leap year!  Very few years I actually noticed that there was a 29th day in February, but since I noticed it - I thought I should at least add a few winter pictures on my photo blog!  All these pictures were taken on our wonderful property or my dad's wood lot behind our house :)

I loved the clouds and this evergreen tree with all the snow... this was an early morning snowshoe run before starting work. This is the only time I ever did that, but it was some fun!  I was out in the woods before sunrise and got to enjoy sunrise from there - awesome!  If you've never done this at least once, very recommended!

After sunrise, everything light up... the trees almost looked like crystal - way more beautiful than what I could capture on film unfortunately!

More snowshoe tracks (from another day though)...

I took a few shots of the snowshoes and sun... a few of them turned out, but I decided to just put one of them.  This was one of my favorites!

My grand-father's old trailer... this thing has hauled tons (literally) of firewood out of the forest behind my house.  I actually worked a whole summer with him cutting and hauling wood (it was a LOT of work!).  My father still uses it to this day.

This one in black and white just for the fun of it :)

2012-02-11

A more colorful than usual sunset in my back yard (was hoping to get some moon pictures, but there were too many clouds that day)

This is a tree that I've taken numerous pictures off... my favorite tree for sure.  We have a nice view of a small valley from our back yard, but the horizon would look dull without it! :)

Self portrait experiment... since I don't have an external flash, I setup the camera on a tripod and bounced the flash on a mirror.  So the picture is of the mirror, but that allowed for side lighting, instead of the usual on-board flash look.

I played with exposure a bit, but it was fairly easy have a decent exposure on both sides...  It was fun either way! :)

2012-02-08

2012 Lego Fair in Dieppe, New Brunswick!

Trains were speeding by... was trying to get some action movement on film while keeping the rest of the image well exposed (not many turned out lol!)

My son was excited to see some familiar trains!  "Spencer" is seen here a tad off-center... 

This was like a real city, simply incredible!

Including city transportation...

This is some kind of robotic dinosaur... 

This transport truck was actually motorized and I think it had a remote control as well...

These robotic Lego's were quite fascinating... Because of movement (that I wanted to capture on film), you don't see all the little men/women on the end of each rope spinning around... This stuff was very nicely done!