Today we had severe thunderstorms - at times five thunderheads producing individual tornados. Regardless, I was spared and I took many great pictures. This picture was taken in Raw and it's colors were minutely manipulated to give it a heavenly look. I've made the antithesis of this image already which looks, appropriately, like the doors to hell. Anyway - tell me what you think!

Another Panoramic I did with five images. This one is not that amazing for the fact that I neglected to note that the guardrails would pose a challenge to making this image possible.

I just returned from vacation - the pictures from the trip will slowly trickle into my photoblog. Here's something I really enjoyed - taking five different exposures from far far away and developing this final stiched image. It *almost* looks seemless - what do you think?

Can you believe it? I took this with my sigma 70-300 SUPER II APO. Best part of the lens? My camera has a 1.5x crop so I took this picture at 450mm!

While most photographer try to concentrate on a small aperture so they get 'sharp' with respect to an object; I'm going for a large aperture that is sharp all around. I took this picture at f/29 with one of my favorite nikkors. This is not an image that everyone will be like. But I like it, it's a taste that one must learn; or am I just tasteless?

A view from my precipice. When the clouds come over the downtown area - myself being far from downtown can see the incandescent light from downtown reflected from the clouds above downtown. Translation - great picture. I think I will start shooting more images in RAW with a filter that leans towards black & white and Sepia. I'm not sure if I can find a median.

Would you believe it that I took this picture in broad day light without the day of a blackbackboard! How, you ask, did I take this image?! It's all in the magic of the aperture. I used a lens of mine - Nikkor of course - that let me go up to the aperture f/32 - and my trusty SB-800. The light is well balanced and the exposure is beautiful - I seriously should publish this. I'm just amazed - even in challenging conditions - the camera and the flash were able to communicate to a degree to make a well balanced exposure. I thought I would have to manually optimize the shot - guess not. Kudos to Nikon on this one.

I really should get a macro flash - but I'm a little low on capital for my hobby. In all honesty, I wanted to post these images saying that they were raw from my camera - but I had to edit them via photoshop. I was so excited to see the product of one hour of being outside after an hour long rain - when I saw the pictures on my computer, I was disappointed. To quell my disappointment, I decided to use my photoshop skills to fix the images up. What do you think?

Another image from today - again, the original was far from this image. In fact, if I showed you the original - most would agree to throw it out. I guess the lesson is learned - be sure to check your metering before you starting your photosession. Cheers!

This is one of my favorite pictures that I've taken this year. These flowers are the precursors to the leaves that grow on one of the bushes in our backyard. They only last a week so I took a picture of them before they dropped dead. I used a 85mm f/2.0 lens at f/2.8. Some have commented that the picture looks 'fake' because of the deep blue-I assure you, the deep blue is 100% real. The sky truly is that blue. The reason it appears like that is because I was using a polarizer, with a polarizer there is no diffused blue coming into the lens - hence a deep blue comes from direct rays on the camera's sensor. Anyway - tell me what you think!!!

Recently, I stopped using low loss jpeg and transitioned fully to Nikon's NEF or RAW format. The transition has been, well, a journey. The advantage is too numerous to count, but the sacrifice in processing time can be challenging. While there are many details of the picture I won't reveal just yet - it's interesting to note that I took this picture without the aid of a tripod - and this was shot at 135mm! Anyway - comments would be appreciated.

Continue the project, maybe...

My writing on this forum has... wandered, and as noted, stopped. A delicate combination of too many ideas, too little ideas, not enough time and not much care at all. I talked to a friend earlier about the lack of initiative that we both share in writing a blog; apparently we have too many ideas and an inability to put them to words.

Regardless - pictures say more than words, or the saying goes. I'll once in a while publish some of musings, but otherwise pictures. I guess this will provide an easy conduit for people to, lets say, 'experience' my experiments in photography. Cheers!