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.

Fire! More fun with shutter speeds

I had the camera in the car today, on the way home from the office, when I came across the fairly common sight of a local farmer burning a junk pile near his horse corral. Inspiration struck and I pulled over and asked permission to take pictures of the fire. It didn't strike him as anything worth taking pictures of, but he humored me.

Again I set the camera to Tv, shutter speed priority, which has to be my favorite camera mode because I use it so often when feeling creative. I hadn't really explored the upper reaches of the camera's shutter speed and here I was in bright daylight-- I thought, lets see if I can make the fire stand still!

First, I started very slowly. With the apeture closed all the way to F36 (which the camera's computer simulates--the lens itself physically only goes to F3.5), the image still overexposed greatly with a shutter speed of 1/4th of a second. I had to bring the gamma down with the computer afterwards to create this image, which is kind of a creepy one if you ask me:


In the corners you can see that this shutter speed actually captured quite a bit of blue flame. Oooooooh...

I started to creep the shutter speed up. 1/15th of a second:


At 1/400th of a second the fire looked pretty realistic. The mirage effect of the large amount of heat being generated was also being captured realistically:


I continued to take photos with progressively faster shutter speeds. 1/1000, 1/2000, 1/3200, etc., until I finally reached the insane shutter speed of 1/8000th of one second. The result detail captured by the camera is pretty neat:



1/8000th of one second shutter speed. Did I mention this camera is cool?