The Great Outdoors

I guess I like nature photography more than anything else, and particularly plants. They are easy to focus on and don't move around, unlike everything else I've tried. Today I took the kids to the Young's River Falls and got no good pictures of the waterfalls themselves. I "forgot" (read: didn't want one more thing to carry) the tripod and paid the price with blurry water. But I did get some other good shots. Hope you like 'em!


The river - I had to lie down on my belly to get this shot. I like the rocks out of focus in the foreground. It made the picture more visually interesting.


My kids love throwing rocks into water, but who doesn't?


I just thought this tree looked cool.


Ahhh. Mr. Slug. The only member of the animal kingdom slow enough for me to take pictures of and keep him in focus. He may be gross, but at least he's camera friendly.

An Afternoon at the Park

We live just two blocks from a cool little park - my daughter always wants to go. My wife is in Portland at an ER Nurse training, so I have the kids alone. What a good time to go take pictures of them in action. I'm only sharing pictures of my son this time, though, 'cause I want to even out their numbers on my blog. I don't want one to get more blog love than another - that would be disastrous.

The other two are also of the park, but not of my kids. My Uncle in law, Sandy, told me about infrared photography, and how much cooler it is than regular stuff. I saw that my photo editing software had a infrared flilter, so I did that to the swings. It looks pretty cool to me, but I don't really know what to look for.


I really like contrast in my photos and I'm always on the lookout for major differences in light, color, or angles that look good through the viewfinder. Hence these berries.


That's all I got!

A Post Post

Astoria is a beautiful little town nearly surrounded by water - we have a bay that is fed by two rivers and then joins yet another river, the Colombia. The Colombia is the largest river on the west coast, and it has fueled Astoria's economy in many ways - shipping, fishing, and canneries. Those canneries were supported by big posts or pylons out in the water. Everything burned down in the '60s (I think) leaving nothing but a bunch of posts in the water. When the tide goes out (oh, did I forget to mention the Pacific in my description of bodies of water?) some of the posts are left in the long shore grasses and look beautiful. For some reason, I am enchanted by these posts. Ever since we moved here, I have loved to look at them and imagine what the town looked like when there was stuff on the pylons. So, today I immortalized my happy posts on digital film. I have no explanations for these, I just like 'em.

So there.

My Daughter

Why is my daughter so darn cute? I like the differences between these two shots.

In this one, there is high contrast and the picture is crystal clear. She's obviously concentrating very hard on something. (For the record, it's plastic play food)

Here, it's blurry and strange. She almost has a grown-up, world weary expression about life. But really she's just watching Spongebob.
It's weird. I see her every day, but I don't notice her many different moods until they are frozen and put on the screen. But she's dang cute.
I should take more pictures of my son, but he's tough - he loves to pose and make weird faces. I'll show those off soon.

New Camera!

It's amazing what a new camera can do for one's creativity. I was trying to figure out some of my new Olympus Evolt camera's options around my house when I snapped these three pictures. The one of the moon required several attempts with different f-stops, shutter speeds and ISO ratings to get one to come out well. I am impressed with the detail a normal retail camera can get!

The other two were just taken in my backyard - the leaf is an old cherry leaf that fell onto my wife's potato plants. I saw the shot as she was telling me about the garden and it's luscious bounty. I think she thought I was a little nuts when I ran back into the house for the camera, but the end result was worth the weird looks.

My final posted picture is of a rotting stump in my backyard. I hate that stump, by the way. On the whole, it's ugly and in my way. But looking through the lens released some amazing architecture from the decomposers of the insect world.

And now I'm tired and I want to go watch a movie with my kids.

Kids!

Okay, so who isn't proud of their kids and likes to show them off? With that in mind, I have never been able to get great pictures of my kids when they are standing there smiling at me. So I just threw a few toys on the floor and started snapping away when they weren't really paying attention. I think it worked pretty well. I then did a little photo editing on the computer and aged the pix with a sepia filter. I like the effect much more than color shots for some reason. I just find it more dynamic.

The third picture was just me having fun with depth of field. I cut out the weird piece of equipment, saved it as a separate layer, and blurred the background. It worked pretty well, but I need to learn how to cut out layers more efficiently/effectively - this looks pretty sloppy to me, but it was a fun first attempt.

Peace - and thanks to the three people who commented.

First Entry!

So here's my first posting. I took these pictures on a walk in Astoria, OR. It was a great sunny day, and I couldn't believe the wide variety of cool images and patterns I noticed when I was holding a camera. I am not great at composing pictures yet, I just wanted to point the camera at stuff and see what happened. I'm pleased with the results, but I know I still have a lot to learn .