Fisherman Foto Fun

Okay, so I wanted to post more sports pictures. So sue me. I have nothing witty or interesting to say about them. You probably should not look at them at all. Try one of the many blogs listed to the right. They are worth your time.


I feel badly for subjects of sports photography. It's hard not to make a weird face when you're playing sports.


Even if your face is not visible, sometimes you can get in weird positions. Poor girls.


Sack on the 10! Fourth down, time to punt, Vikings!


Here you can see the continuing sad saga of our injured fisherman. It sucks watching a game from the sidelines when you should be playing, but it's even worse when you're all alone.


More motion blur. I just like the fact that there really is no main subject in the picture.
That's all.

AHS Fall Sports

School is almost back in session, but the sports teams have been hard at work for several weeks. Volleyball and Football got a chance to test their mettle this Friday, and I was there to document the action for the Astor Post. I will never be as good at sports photography as my predecessor, Cam McFarland (I mean, come on - his name is 'Cam') - who has left AHS for bigger and better things, but I'll give it my best shot. By the way, I love puns.


Coach Hunt giving her girls a pep talk - I like that you can tell all of her girls' eyes are on her - even the ones whose faces we can't see.


The lighting is bad in our gym - so I had to crank the ISO rating way up to get this shot. It's still a little fuzzy, but I'm glad for the zoom lens.


On to Football! I was pacing the sidelines with my camera and saw all this stuff set up for me - as pretty as a picture! So I took one.


This was pretty heartbreaking. This kid hurt his knee on the first play of the first game of the season. He's a Senior. I hope he heals up quickly.


Ahh. . . the thrill of the hunt! I know some people don't like my blurry photos, but this time I think it really adds an element of motion and excitement to the shot. Plus, it was really dark by the time I took this picture, so I didn't really have a choice. By the way, #54 smashed this guy into the grass about .5 seconds after I snapped the shutter, so that look of "I want to destroy you" is not faked.

Hopefully I'll get some Soccer and Cross Country pictures up soon - though I do have to go to their games/meets first.

Lights

I am not much of a photographer, I know, but I ever since I started looking at life through a camera lens, I have become much more aware of light and how it effects everything it touches. I like the lighting in these next couple of shots - though I had nothing to do with it - I just happened to be there while Mr. Sun did his business.


I like the contrast in this shot - both the shadow and light on the steeple, as well as the deep blue of the sky with the bright white of, um, the steeple. I got lucky to get this shot on such a clear day. The single subject is striking. I like alliteration. I should be an Anglo-Saxon poet.


I recently re-watched Pixar's "A Bug's Life" with my kids and became interested in the translucence of leaves. I waited around for a bug to walk across my subject leaves, but they never did. I guess I won't make the sequel.


My twin nieces came to visit with their brother last week and they wanted me to take pictures of their skateboarding exploits. This one turned out rather well. I don't think the lighting or contrast are super-sweet, but I do like how this picture looks. I managed to catch her right before she "dropped in" - the next picture in the series (using my camera's multiple shot feature) is of the ramp, a shadow, and a big blue sky. Yay! I took an action photo that wasn't blurry!

Replace "busy" with "lazy".

I've been busy. Too busy to take any pictures. As I think back on the last couple of weeks, I can't remember what made me so busy. But I'm sure I was very, very busy, nonetheless. I looked through my picture files and found a couple of gems that I never posted before. Here they are, almost as if they were new!


Kid + flower = cuteness.

Awww. . . my boy and his cousins. My son loves his relatives - good thing too, 'cause most of 'em have moved back into our state, so we'll be seeing a lot more of them.

I just realized that I didn't show any pictures of my children's faces. I was just too busy to look for those kinds of pictures, I guess.

My Life's Ladies

I am blessed to be married to one of the world's greatest women. She is kind, loving, laid back, and driven to succeed, and all the while puts up with me and all of my strange (read: idiotic) eccentricities. And besides all of those great qualities, she is beautiful beyond compare. Luckily for me, we had a daughter who shares many of her traits, most especially, her beauty. We'll see how my daughter deals with me when I start spouting random facts to her friends on road trips - will she quietly ignore me and get on with her life, or will she melt in embarrassment and hope for a car wreck? Only time will tell.
But anyway, here are some pictures I took of my wife and daughter at Enchanted Forest, a mini-Disneylandesqe type of amusement park outside of Salem, Oregon.


It's a Super-Fun-Happy-Slide! Yay! Both of them are out of focus - darn low lighting! - but I like my wife's expression. I think she may be having more fun than my daughter.



Tickling is very fun for all parties involved. If you look carefully, you can see the stamp on my wife's hand, ensuring an easy re-entry later on in the day. No ticket stubs for us, boy! This is high class livin' at its finest.



The natural world is wonderful. And here, I am using the word to mean "full of wonder" as opposed to "great." I feel like Lemony Snickett right now. I am such a dork.

PS: I just finished Harry Potter 7 yesterday at 7:15 pm. I started reading it at 11:45 am the same day. Without counting bathroom breaks and short pauses for snacks, this means I read the 759 page book at a rate of 108 pages per hour. I put this here to show two things - 1) That book was frickin' awesome and exciting - by far the most action packed of the series - two thumbs up! And 2) That's how fast I can read, Rob.

Cousins

Ahh, family reunions - the chance to get together with a bunch of people you are related to, but with whom you don't always relate. Luckily, I get along great with my family, so this runion was a blast. We spent our nights hoplessly overcrowded in three 'cabins' (bigger than my house) with aunts and uncles and cousins and grandpas and grandmas spilling out all over the place. But it was all in good fun, and I'm glad to say I got some good use of my camera while there. I'm also happy that this will be my last post of a picture of Smith Rock, and thankfully, this time there's people in it!


These are my nieces, Kiana & Kaylene (they're twins) who live in Corvallis and love skateboarding. They are quite good too, especially since they just recently started. They have their first sponsor, and I look forward to finding a sweet T to wear with their new brand. Anyway, I forced them to hike with me all over creation on our trip and only let them pause momentarily to snap a few photos. They were wonderfully patient and I appreciate their ability to feign interest in all the weird science facts I constantly spewed in their direction.



This is a picture of my two kids and their cousin Aaron, one of the newest members of our extended family. Both my kids love babies more than anything (including cookies) and so there wasn't much coaxing needed to get this shot. Of course, I think my daughter is watching TV here, but the other two are interested in what's going on!

Peace for now . . . war later?

Smith Rock - The Sequel

Same story as last time, just more pictures.


I like this one for its weird perspective - is the camera looking straight up, or is it looking off of a cliff top at the horizon? You decide.

Here's a shot of where I was. This is on the trail heading down to the main trails. About 2 minutes before this picture was taken, I almost dropped my daughter out of our baby backpack onto some sharp pointy rocks. Luckily for all involved, I caught her by her ankles just moments before her face collided with the ground. But, this is still a nice picture.


Same as above, just different angle and closer. I like the river in this shot.

This picture makes me dizzy - these cliffs were towering over us at incredible heights, and this shot really captures the vertigo staring up at them all afternoon started to give me.

If I were Uncle Rico, I could throw a football right through these goalposts. But I'm not.

I do have more pictures of Smith Rock, but I'm tired of just cliffs and sky. I'll try to add more variety next time!