Granted it's *just* a construction site. My attempt to fuse foreground and background together in one exposure was a failure. But the image gives you a feeling of transcending.... maybe a heavenly gate?

This is turning into a cloud blog, I can't help it. I think I'll try going a little less out in the evening time. I can't keep my eyes off the beautiful clouds! This formation almost seems like a bucket which is collecting the higher clouds. Again, this might be crazy.

I took this picture in hopes of capturing a 727 flying past the moon. That was my hope, didn't turn out that way. I was preoccupied by a bird so I missed hte plane go by the moon. But, if you notice, the picture gives me this feeling of optimism and pessimism. The bright white + blue being optimism with the dark grayish clouds undertaking the optimism. Maybe I'm pushing it.

When the sun is setting - the light passes through the layers of the atmosphere and paints the clouds in so many colors. See how the lower clouds are a different shade than the higher ones. The scene is indescribable - yet we all see it daily!

I shot this image without my polarizer, but the image still turned out nice. I'm just impressed I got such a nice closeup of this leaf when I was about 25 meters under it!

The scenic route to Sudbury in Canada is absolutely beautiful and unappreciated. But, the unnerving part of the entire drive are crazy truck drivers. This guy hadn't even tied most of the logs correctly and he was drunker than drunk!

I heard reports that there was a funnel cloud in the area - I've only seen one once in my entire life. I took my camera, followed the directions from the radar map and found this funnel whisping right by my home. It actually was twenty miles away, but still I could see it run from right to left. Good thing it didn't touch down to form a f1 tornado!

I was looking outside to see if it will be a cloudy day, or sunny day. Then I see this beautiful gift that nature put right outside my window! Brilliant! I had to wait until nighttime though - the background ruins the shot. I'll have to do some images from the otherside tomorrow night. I just love it. The line in the middle is overexposed - I'll fix that next shot. The line is a long line of bugs (mosquitos, smaller insects) which were caught up in the web and the spider (in the middle) has wrapped them up in silk. So basically, it's a food repository in the air.

The last severe thunderstorm to come by my home was quite severe. This lightning bolt hit about a mile away - the thunder that resulted set off car alarms and broke some windows in the area. I'm surprised my lens is still intact.

This image seems so fresh. I'm now paying closer attention to the pictures I took this summer. My area has recently been hit by a dry spell - with the occasional thunderstorm that tries its best to not give any rain. The picture has focus, but the leaf in front is annoying. I'll have to photoshop that out. :-P

This picture is a picture I took, planned to delete. When I processed it and downloaded it - it turned out to be a masterpiece! I love how the shadow adds to the moment. What do you think? It's nothing in comparison to yesterday's post, but still.

This is one of my most favorite pictures taken! The picture is of a girl who lives in a Dehaat (Village) in the Punjab Province of Pakistan. The people have little to no education, very little economic strength - and no knowledge of what they can do; in summary, because of their status in the socio-economic strata, they are never able to fully realize their potential and contribute to the world. I wish I took a hair or two from her - I could have done a DNA sampling of her. I can speculate on her background, but I'm not sure. I think this is the best picture I've taken in years!

What's this guy thinking about? I wanted his permission to take this picture - apparently, he was concentrating on the lake. So I didn't bother him. Needless to say, after more htan 30 minutes of goofing around; on my way out, there he was. What a deep trance.

I know, I know; the image seems out of place. Well, the image is really out of place. I was looking at my archives and this picture stood out to me... it says so much. It's beautiful! For a person who likes the summer, I want some winter storms - NOW!

I love strobe photography!

I love this picture - it's as abstract as I can get. I'm not sure, but does this remind you of the Saulk Institute?

One of those linear shots that an inexperienced photographer cannot resist. Needless to say, I capitalized on the situation. I love the sun - gotta control it somehow.

Ever seen shadows cast by clouds like this? I was just surprised - two straight lines. The thunderhead was larger than any I've seen before in my short life!

I lean heavily towards natural scenes on this blog, but I occasionally like to do something artificial. Here's some lightpainting. I got these sticks called "PhulJhari" for only three dollars. It's a good buy for something so inexpensive. I shot this at f/9 and for ten seconds. Anything like f/7.1 which most shoot at overexposes. Come to think of it, I should have shot it at f/11, then the shadows would have been minimized.

The clouds I saw on this day have got to be the scariest I've seen in a long time. Although they look scary, they did little. At most, we got a light sprinkle - not one instance of a lightning bolt! AHH!

I tried to capture the essense of the pond by taking an image of the wild plant life. I think I included a little too much sky - which takes away from the image. I will have to improve on this as well. This day was not a good day at all in the world of photography for me. :-(

This picture has made me realize what I've been missing out on - reflecting ponds! My next great mission, going to a lake and sunset or sunrise and taking pictures of the sun in the water. From myself googling such a scene - I think I might like to go for the morning shot. We'll see.

Consider this contemporary art - what do you think? I took this image because there was a lack of good subject and the light was too irresistable to let loose. Sorry about the hairy foot - I promise the otherone isn't as hairy!

I don't know, I took this picture - trashed it. Cleaning up the trashbin and realized that it was a treasure. It says a lot for something so simple. Is it just me?

This image makes me think of peace. This bird pestered me for hours wanting food from me. But I refused to give the bird food. Why should I make the bird want food from humans when this creature has the innate talent to find food. The jerks right by me gave this some gummy bears - I'm not sure if that was any good for it.

This is one of my favorite flowers of all time. I shot this at f/13 (for sharpness) and to limit the light from the background. See, the ironic thing is that htis was not apart of some amazing flower display. I found this flower amount other flowers which were dieing off because of the constant shock of car fumes at a rest stop in Canada.

Photoshop is an amazing piece of software! Of course, this shot is impossible on multiple levels - but still, it does seem spectacular. The only problem now is with the entire image hosting software - it uses a high level of compression which ruins the quality of the images. I'll have to fix this too.

This is an amazing picture. I was trying to shoot a picture of the moon at 450mm. Then all of a sudden - almost like the bird wanted me to take its picture; this bird comes up right in front of me. I had a nice telephoto lens - so I capitalized on the situation. I shot in raw mode and the picture turned out beautifully!

Copyright vs. Wrecking an Artwork?

When I started to post images on this blog - I always put a small logo onto the image to insure that no one would steal anyone of my images. With digital technologies getting better, the liklihood of someone stealing my work - has increased. Recently, in a turn of irony, I've started to ignore the entire idea of labeling my photography with some weird logo saying "It's mine." I don't know - I hate ruining the pictures I take with words - and the effect that the picture has on the individual is lessoned by some weird logo.

So, the solution; I'm no longer providing larger versions of the image. So the largest version available from my blog will be about 640X480; which isn't too large and you can do the least amount of damage with them. I imagine an individual can get a truly beautiful 2x2 from that small resolution.

I'm working on a new method that will not interfere with the artwork - it's something that is a built in feature of GIMP. In another two weeks I'll start experimenting.

Another picture of birds - once again, at the beginning of the year. This bird is quite possibly the smallest visitor of my backyard. Albeit the smallest, it's song is the loudest! I mistook it for a Canary - but now I realize it isn't a very bright yellow. Any idea on what genus species this bird might be?

I took this a long time ago - well, at the beginning of the summer months. Anyway - it was the first time I got to test out my Sigma APO SUPER II 70-300mm lens. The image turned out to be spectacular! The only problem, I shot in JPEG - so much was lost by shooting in jpeg. Now I by default shoot raw + BasicJpeg. Anyway - isn't the bird beautiful?

Here's the product of myself trying firework photography. I used f/9 with a handheld congtrol - no specific shutter speed. July fourth was a horrible time - there lights in the foreground which provided me ghosts aplenty. This was taken at a local fireworks display - this particular firework was shown at least ten times - it's amazing and beautiful. Well, I learned something.

This image seems like a 'normal' image, but this image captures so much of the moment that I cannot help but put it on here. I wanted to print htis image out as an 8-10, but I didn't think this image would turn out so I took it in low quality mode; darn! Now I can only do with a good 5x7. Regardless, it's a nice image.

Light Painting

Can you say "Light Paint?" I think this is in prep for August 14th.

Sometimes the best images come by accident. I was walking into a public building switching settings to prepare for indoor flash photography. All of a sudden, my finger slipped and I took a shot. I neglected to delete the image. I downloaded all the images and realized that my mistake was actually a nice picture. There's so many amazing things about this. Most of which - the shadow should be dark, but then again it is almost as light as the sidewalk! Amazing!!!

Settings - for July 4th

I've been pondering on this for a while even to the point of posting messages on the net to find the opinions of my comrades. I'm trying to figure out what will be the best settings for taking pictures of fireworks. I have a book from the Seattle Film Works on how to take pictures of fireworks - but that's film. Film and digital are thought to be the same, but they're not.

I'm thinking I'll go with a f/9 with a shutter speed of 9 seconds. Probably use a shutter control. I'm still debating what lens. Should I use my kit lens 18-70mm, or the telephoto 70-300mm. I think I'll be close enough so it will be an 18-70; but just in case I'll keep the telephoto in my car.

We'll see. I'll post the results here.

As promised, this is the antithesis of the heavenly picture - a hellish portrait. Well, someone already has commented that it is less hellish than heavenly. Regardless, let's hear what you think. It wasn't postprocessed except for the 75% Sepia - via Photoshop.

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!

Not that busy of an intersection. It's okay for the a380 to come by here - but what happens when the 727 lands?

I went for a quick stroll in my bagh... I thought this picture would be horrible, it wasn't. Turned out quite nicely, I will have to use my new vivid filter.

The view from outside my window

Finally, I get to test out the Macro capability of the 70-300 Sigma lens. Although I'm not completely happy with it - I was using my old tripod which was made to vibrate.