Some things I've been doing recently

Growing a beard a la Al Gore (and shaving it off again as soon as friends started calling me Bob Vila)


Congratulating Helio Castroneves on beating his federal tax evasion case (I'm not altogether sure he heard me though)


Getting as close as possible to Danica Patrick (only the 230mph speed differential, a very tall fence, and 75 yards of seats seperates us)


Learning some new combat carbine drills with friends (no live ammo involved this time, who can afford to shoot these days, but we can still learn to work as a team)





Watching Mitch Maier single up the middle (right past Joel Zumaya and into center field)


Watching my wife win a bunch of swag on the Royals "Crown Vision" HD screen


Cheering Alberto Callaspo as he advances the runner to second base


Admiring the newly rennovated Kaufmann Stadium after the game

DVC Training

A selection of pics from the DVC Training handgun class I attended over the weekend. I'm pretty sore, but physically I performed better than last year, so I'm proud of that. Generous use of sport mode on the camera resulted in 1,236 images I have to sort through, but here are some highlights.

DVC's slogan is, "Hope is not a course of action... TRAIN!"

Consider the lillies... or maybe the tulips

Had a nice day today with an abundance of sunshine, so I took a moment to get out of the house and take some pics of the perennials that have made their yearly appearance around our property. Put the camera on full manual controls, set the ISO to 200 manually, and snapped away with different apeture sizes to experiment with field of view. With the apeture opened up all the way to the stops the field of view is insanely short, which I really find intriguing. Occasionally using a touch of zoom, and focusing very carefully, I did my best Georgia O' Keefe impersonation.

F5.6, 1/1600


F4.5, 1/320


F14, 1/250


F10, 1/125


F36, 1/60


Hey, this isn't a flower! What are you doing here? Why is my camera being sniffed?

Sunset and the pear tree

After days of wind and rain, we caught a break today and had a nice warm sunset. Morgan and I noticed that the pear trees in the backyard have started to bloom, so I took some pics and we played with the dog for a bit until it got dark.

I'm really happy with these pics because they haven't been digitally altered to adjust the color saturation or anything. The lighting was just THAT good.





I did take a bit of flash photography of the blossoms themselves. For being flash photos, they came out pretty well. Beautiful little blossoms that portend heavy fruit later on.