Infringed-o-riffic?

Oh, snap! As my eagle-eyed buddy RickyD discovered and posted over on bikecentric, it appears that one of my photos...



...has been, um, borrowd...



...at least in concept. And by none other than Bicycling magazine, in both print (October 2008 edition, page 49) and on the web.

Just for fun, I thought we'd play that old Highlights Magazine game "Spot the similarities/difference between the two photos". Here's what I found:

Things that are the same
Singlespeed
Baby-blue frame
Skinny, black fork
Front disk brake
Rear rim brake
Bendy (Mary?) handlebars
Bike position over log
Rider's leg position
Race number plate
Zip-tie position holding front brake cable to fork
Black spandex shorts, light swoosh (and position of swoosh)
Black socks with light top
Black shoes with three light straps, yellowish sole and yellowish heel part
Black 3/4 finger gloves with small white stripe at the pinky
Backpack straps (number and position including the dangling end of a strap)
Thick stripe down the side of the rider's jersey

Things that are different
Jersey color
Number on race plate
Their rider doesn't have a head. Poor fella.

(Some of the similarities and differences are more easily seen looking at the larger copy of their illustration found in the print mag.)

Did I miss anything?

I wonder if I should be more pissed than I am. I mean, imitation *is* the greatest form of flattery. But flattery don't pay the rent. Maybe I'll send them an email.

EDIT TO ADD:

My buddy Ben (THANKS BEN!) put together a little animated GIF of the two images. It leaves no doubt that they're the exact same shot. In fact, I'd be surprised if the "artist" did little more than take my image, run a Photoshop "sketch" filter on it, and posted it. Make sure your image animation is turned on then check it out...



It's not as humorous to me this morning.

So,

"...Do ya want to drive it?" he asked as we swung a left around a 90º corner at something north of 60 mph.



Do I??



The "it" in question is a $250,000, Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera. V10 engine. 500+hp. Sleek lines. Low weight. More carbon bits than a Stealth fighter. And gas mileage that would make a Hummer driver blush. F*ck yeah, I want to drive it.

Only there was a problem. A simple matter of physical limitations: My ability (and lack thereof) to squeeze behind the wheel. You see, the distance from the underside of the steering wheel to the pedals on the floor is less than the distance from my knee to my ankle. (Just one of the perils nobody thinks of when they say to someone 6'6" "It must be nice to be so tall". Sure, it's nice, but at least you can drive a $250k sports car when you want to! Don't mind me...I'll just be over here in my '78 Buick. And don't even get me started on low-hanging ceiling fans!). Anyway...what was I saying? Oh yeah...So I can't move my legs/feet enough to go from the gas pedal to the brake pedal. So, until they make a production stretch model for us freak-sized folks, I'm stuck riding shotgun.

It was still a ride during which the acceleration and deceleration *literally* made me light-headed.

The reason I was able to get up close and personal with that nifty little toy was the local Lamborghini dealership had a "Hey! Why don't you come by and test out a new Lamborghini" event and hired me to shoot photos. (I tried bartering my services for goods, but sadly they weren't having it). The shooting was nothing special, just people standing around chit-chatting amidst freakishly expensive cars. I also tried to get shots of happy test riders returning from their runs. I guess the idea is that when people see how good/happy they look in the $100+k cars, they'll be more inclined to buy them.

So I may post a few random shots of mine in the next day or two. Sadly, the shots above were simply taken from a website of freely-downloadable desktop backgrounds, shot by someone else. Mine are not nearly as professional looking. Of course, I wasn't in a pro studio the size of an airplane hangar, either. I'm just sayin'.

Blackwater 2k7

I made a trip out to Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge again this weekend. The first summer-time trip ever, I think. I left the house at 4:30am Saturday and got to the refuge by sunrise ~6:30). I shot during the nice morning light, went and checked into a campground a few miles from the refuge during the harsh mid-day light and took a nap, then went back to the refuge for the evening hours and shot until sunset (roughly 7:30pm). Sunday, I was back at the refuge by about 7am and shot until a bit after 9am, when I headed for home. The shooting was decent; I saw a couple of red-tail fox, a couple of the endangered Delmarva Fox Squirrels, three Osprey (which I'd never seen before), and ~5 bald eagles, and a number of decent sized snakes, specific flavor unknown. Additionally, there were countless egrets, herons and small shore-birds about as well. Two of the snakes were in the water, and if I remember correctly, MD only has two species of water snakes: the copperhead and the cottonmouth. And these weren't copper in color.

For the trip, I rented a Canon 100-400mm lens. I've pretty much decided that I will never buy one of these lenses. The 100-400mm is a nice enough if your subject is close. If it's even a little bit distant, the image quality goes to crap. Fast. An example (click the images for the full-sized shots): Here's a shot of a heron, pretty close to me...maybe 15 meters away:



Nice enough, right? Now here's a bald eagle farther off. Probably 50-75 meters or so:



Looks like crap, right? This is the longest lens I've ever mounted to my camera, so I don't have much experience with this kinda thing, but I have to imagine that 500mm and 600mm (and 1,200mm, for god's sake) lenses exist to take photos of things far away. If distant things always looked like, I doubt Canon would have much business in the long-lens department.

So, as an alternative (not that anybody cares), I'll be looking at the 400mm f/5.6 prime, the next time I have $1,300 burning a hole in my pocket. Word on the mailing lists is that this lens significantly out performs the 100-400mm lens at the 400mm end. When I have the 100-400mm on the camera, at least 95% of my shots are at the 400mm end. So I won't miss much giving up that 100-399mm range. And the improvement in color/contrast and sharpness I gain will be well worth the trade.

Here are a few other keeper shots from the weekend. I may also have one or two more to post later. For the record, I'm not sure I'm digging this Flickr thing. I like the way my old Pbase site works in conjunction with my blog better, I think.

Fog-o-licious

So I blew off going to shoot the fourth, and final for 2007, Cranky Monkey race today. I've been running full-speed for a couple of weeks now and just needed a day to decompress. The idea of being up and out of the house by 7am just didn't sound like fun. And if it's not fun, it's work.

I just got back from a quick, busy trip out to San Francisco.



The wife is out there for a couple of months for job training. Her new employer was nice enough to fly me out for a (much overdo) visit.

I got out there Friday. On Saturday, the wife and I headed north, through Napa wine country and stopped in Calistoga, a cool little town with a post-WWII feel. It also has a bit of a tourist-trap vibe thrown in for good measure. We stopped off at the Calistoga Inn for a drink, where I had a tasty brewed-on-site Calistoga Amber Ale. We then went on to another place for dinner where I got to try a Lagunitas IPA. Tasty. Hoppy. I'll definitely keep my eye out for this again, tho I don't recall ever seeing it here on the east coast. Maybe I just never noticed it. Oh yeah. And I had a mud bath, too. Man, I'm still picking bits of mud outta nooks and crannies. Much like I see skydiving or alligator wrestling, that's one of them once-in-a-lifetime kinda events. Been there, done it. Cross it off the list and move on.

Sunday, we headed south down Highway 1.



A beautiful drive down the coast with stops in Santa Cruz and Carmel (the town formerly under the rule of Mayor Eastwood). Santa Cruz had a cool college-town feel. I could definitely see myself living here (all the hippies not withstanding). At least for a while. Besides...with a town named after a mountain bike company, there have got to be some good trails around there, too. Right?

Monday the wife had to put in a half-day's work, so we stuck around the apartment. She working, I reading the infinitely fascinating "Under the Banner of Heaven" (highly recommended, btw). After the relaxed morning, we decided to wander down and book one of the bay boat tours. Yeah, touristy. But eff it. I'm a tourist.



We left the marina, tooled around under the Golden Gate Bridge, came back around Alcatraz, somewhat close to Angle Island then back to port. The kite surfers took advantage of the high winds and boat wake to give us some acrobatic entertainment. Unfortunately they were too far off for my short camera lens to be of much use.

Tuesday the wife had to go into the office, so I had the day to explore solo. I rented a beater Fuji mountain bike and headed off around the Embarcadero towards the Golden Gate. I crossed the bridge and headed off into the Marin countryside, following the cartoon-quality-map intended for fat tourists on rented hybrids (or in my case, fat tourists on rented mountain bikes), in search of a brown and twisty dotted line bearing the vague description: "MTB Trail".

I make a switchback climb up a gravel road and survey the lay of the land, which looked pretty much like this, except more 3D in real life:



From the top of the hill, I can see the fire-road-width trails a bit further down the road. It takes a bit of searching to find the actual trail-head. Unfortunately, by the time I hit dirt, I'm already a significant number of miles into my ride (for my outta-shape ass). I'm pretty beat, and time is running out (gotta get back into the city to meet the wife when she gets off of work. The perils of a single set of apartment keys). I roam around the dirt for a mile or two (all a gradual climb, damnit). I reach a point, this point as a matter of fact:



and simply turn around. The nice thing about the mile-plus gradual climb is that it becomes a mile-plus moderately-high-speed descent on the return trip.

I make my way back to SF proper the same way I came out to the 'burbs. Google-mapping the whole ride after the fact, it looks like I managed to do about 24 miles of riding.

Guess *some* shots came out OK...

The National Capitol Area Chapter of the American Red Cross posted a couple of my shots on their homepage.



(screen cap of http://redcrossnca.org/)
The two shots on the right are mine. These are shots I took as a volunteer photographer at their Fire & Ice Ball a few weeks ago. They also thought it was a good idea to make every shot I gave them (even the *really* bad ones) available for all to see in their gallery. (Note that there are shots from at least one of the other photographers in the gallery too...possibly more). Nice to see my name up in lights...as it were.

Fire, Ice, Aaron, Michael and George

(The shot above is the event ice sculpture. I was trying to capture colors to match the event name ("Fire and Ice Ball"). The red "Fire" at the top are the lights of the stage shining thorough. The white behind the word "Ice" is where the frost on the surface of the sculpture hasn't completely melted away yet.

This past Saturday night was the Fire and Ice Ball, put on by the American Red Cross of the National Capital Area. I managed to weasel my way in...er..."volunteer" as an event photographer. In attendance was former VA Senator George "you know the word" Allen, former MD Lt. Governor Michael Steel, a bunch of wounded soldiers fresh off of the front lines at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and Aaron Neville providing the evening's entertainment.

Shooting this kind of evening event always *always* proves to me just how good the guys who shoot this kinda stuff for a living *really* are. This stuff is hard. The light is dim. It's constantly changing. Lots of times, there's no clearly defined subject to shoot (how do you shoot a group of people where half of what you're seeing are the backs of heads?). On top of that, there are things that I never thought to consider that totally affect your photos. At one point, I was shooting a small group in a "backstage" room. I snapped off a couple, moved a little, then snapped off a few more. When I reviewed my shots, the two sets had totally different exposures. It turned out that the ceiling height over my head changed by 6" or more between the two sets of shots, affecting my flash's intensity (it was pointed up to bounce off the ceiling). Who thinks to check the ceiling when they're shooting a group of people collected together in front of them for 15 seconds? Not me, I assure you. And that's why the pros are the pros, and I'm still a rank-amateur.

Of the dozen or so shots I snapped in the backstage room, I did manage to get a few that worked. Most are of Aaron Neville and his brother Charles standing next to random people. This one is Aaron, Charles, the vets from Walter Reed, and their significant others. It might be my favorite of the evening...even with it's problems.


(Click the image for a larger version)

So, a couple of problems exist(ed) with this shot. One: there were a couple of photographers in the room, so the subjects didn't know where to look. For this shot, most were looking at somebody else.

Potentially worse, the soldier on the far left totally blinked the instant I snapped. And the guy on the far right was holding an unsightly water bottle.

So I decided to use my budding (slowly...very slowly) PhotoShop skills to try and make things better. I found another shot where blinky-soldier had his eyes open. I copied them from that image, and pasted them into the final shot. I then spent some time cloning out the water bottle. Finally, I cropped out a bit of the background yuck, and added a bit of sharpening. Here's the original. What do you think? I know, I still have a lot to learn in PS, particularly about how to modify with a delicate hand.


(Click the image for a larger version)

More changes, and bike race photos

I set up a new blog over the weekend.

TooFatToRace

Make a note. Bookmark, even. Pop in from time to time. I'll probably cross promote it here when I update it. Cuz I'm just the self-promoting kinda guy.

It's purpose is to complement this blog, and consolidate my mountain bike race photos in a single location. Since I've found myself shooting more and more races every year (Wednesdays@Wakefield, the Cranky Monkey series, 12 Hours of Lodi Farm, and whatever else comes up moderately close to the TooFatToRace basecamp).

As time permits, I'm going to copy my existing race posts from this blog to that one. A couple are already done.

I've also posted up my first new content there too. I shot the Leesburg Baker's Dozen endurance race on 4/22/07.


I call this one "some guy dropping in"

Unfortunately, I only had about two hours to shoot, out of the 13 hours of race time. See the complete bunch of photos here:

http://www.pbase.com/gmr2048/leesburgbakersdozen

If you see something you like and want a full-rez copy, let me know and I'll do my best to get it to you.

Something you don't see everyday

The local Ferrari shop at which I occasionally work took delivery of a shiny red Ferrari Enzo today. Luckily, a buddy who works there gave me the head's up.

After work, I ran by my house, grabbed all my camera gear, then headed a bit further west to the shop. I spent an hour or two shooting photos of the rare (1 of 398 left) $1,200,000 beast. It's a beauty. But shooting it's ultra shiny body, under showroom lights, with tons of clutter around (funny how a room full of $200,000 Ferraris can become "clutter", isn't it?) wasn't easy. It makes you appreciate the guys who shoot cars for car mags and make them look good. Anyway, here are four quick shots of it. These are straight out of the camera. No post processing at all. Once I have some time, I'll go through the photos and try to clean them up. Anyway, here's what I got:








(You'd think for $1.2M you'd get some power windows. You don't. The round thing in the above photo is the window crank.)

Shorpy

I dig history. And I dig photography. So it goes to follow that I dig old photos of people doin' stuff. Therefore, obviously, I *really* dig Shorpy.

Shorpy.com, along with sister-site GhostCowboy.com, have quickly become two of my favorite web sites/RSS feeds. They get the "hometown boys make good" vibe for being based about a mile from where I live (er..."lived" a month ago). But more importantly, Shorpy features old photos of everyday life. If I've read it correctly, the owners/operators of Shorpy are combing the Prints and Photographs Reading Room at the Library of Congress website, and highlighting images they find interesting. Some of my personal favorites are:


93
100
104
105
115
137
159
178


Some are so fantastic that I may buy prints of them. Or just make prints myself. I think all the photos are public domain, so there should be no copyright concerns.

Recently, the good folks at Shorpy began allowing members (free registration) to upload interesting historical photos to the site (uploaders retain ownership/copyright...see my previous posts on shitty Terms of Service). When my grandmother died in 2000, I took a computer and scanner to her house and spent hours scanning in a ton of old photos she had (since they were destined to go to her son, my uncle). Of those photos, there are a few general-interest shots that I thought would be cool to share. I posted them up to Shorpy yesterday and they're now available for your viewing pleasure.

The first is a shot of women working in what appears to be a munitions factory. The photo has a penciled-in note pointing out "Mrs. Ruth Van Fleet". She was a woman who lived with my grandmother until 1943.


Check the full sized photo and comments (if any) here

The second photo I uploaded is a shot of a group of women military cadets marching in formation. The photo was sent to my grandmother as a postcard. The date on the postmark is "May 3, 1917 6pm".


The full sized shot, text of the postcard, and comments (if any) can be seen here.

And finally, great-grandpa and his PA coal mining coworkers. Date unknown, but I'd guess early 1900s. Great-grandpa is the miner at the lower left.


Full sized here

Anyway, to avoid this post sounding like a total commercial, I guess I should say that in no way do I benefit from Shorpy. I just wanted to share a new cool find.

Feel the love

I received an email from a buddy pointing out that Team Bike Works, organizers of the "12 Hours of Lodi Farm" race, have updated their web page for this year's event

http://www.teambikeworks.org/

...and have used one of my photos from the '06 race on the home page.



Pretty cool. I'm fairly sure I told them last year that they were free to use my shots on their page as long as they gave me a photo credit and a link back to the gallery. Both of which they did. I just kinda wished they'd have shot me an email mentioning the usage.

Anyway, this year's race is the same weekend as another event at which I'm volunteering my photography...err...skillz: The American Red Cross of the National Capital Area's Fire & Ice Ball (The National Capital Area Chapter's Annual Gala).



So a busy weekend is planned, but hopefully I'll come away with a bunch more MTB race photos, as well as a bunch of formal shots of Gala attendees. I've never shot an uber-formal event like this. Here's hoping it goes well. Oh, yeah. I'll be sporting a tux, too.

Crappy TOS, take 2

Ok, so I didn't find this one (unless you consider reading about it on somebody else's blog "finding" it), but I thought I'd add it to the Crappy Terms Of Service group I'm developing:

Basically, Smirnoff is screwing you in the fine print of their photo contest too.

http://www.photoattorney.com/2007/04/
alert-smirnoff-shares-your-copyright.html

Score!

(Here's another one of those posts I've saved in draft format too long. This one is over 13 months old).




Scored a new gadget the other day (err...year). I found, via craigslist, a guy selling an early '90s era Canon EOS RebelX 35mm film camera for a paltry sum ($20 if I remember correctly). It's pretty low-tech, but should make an excellent backup body, since it works with my existing EOS lenses and flashes (unlike my ancient Minolta 35mm). Another nice aspect is that my 24mm wide lens on this body will truly be 24mm. The same lens on my digital body is essentially 38mm.

I've got a roll of film halfway through it now (edit to add: the same roll is still at the same halfway point today, 13 months later. D'oh!). Just gotta find some interesting stuff to shoot and finish off the roll, then see how the prints look.

Almost famous



A couple of weeks back, I submitted my second photo (shown above in ultra-crap quality) to the "Rider's Eye" section of Dirt Rag Magazine. By the comments in this thread over on the MORE forum, it sounds like it was published. The rider with the mad skillz is Larry Camp who rides (used to ride?) for local VA bike shop The Bike Lane.

So it ain't National Geographic (or Sports Illustrated, for that matter). But I dig it.


(Edited to add link to the Bike Lane)

Crappy (photo) TOS, Part I

After seeing a few too many "Submit your photos to our site for the chance to be famous" sites, I've decided to use this space to point out the subtle nuances of the crappy "Terms of Service" (hereafter "TOS") that go along with many of those offers.

Frequently, in the fine print (that no one ever reads) of news organizations or online photography contests, there will be a line which reads (roughly) "By sending us your photo, you give up all rights to it, and give us rights to do whatever we want with it, including selling it, forever and ever. Amen. Oh, and you get nothing for it in return. Have a nice day.". So in the off, off, *off* chance that you happen to catch that Pulitzer Prize winning moment (it happens occasionally, as with the amateur who snapped the photo of the firefighter holding the child's limp body after the Oklahoma City bombing years ago) and submit it to CNN, you'd have given up almost all rights to the photo.

I'll try to find these crappy Terms of Service and highlight them here. Who knows. Maybe the information will help somebody retain some rights to their property.

First on the list is CNN. The "screw you and your rights" paragraph of their TOS reads:

"By submitting your material, for good and valuable consideration, the sufficiency and receipt of which you hereby acknowledge, you hereby grant to CNN and its affiliates a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to edit, telecast, rerun, reproduce, use, syndicate, license, print, sublicense, distribute and otherwise exhibit the materials you submit, or any portion thereof, as incorporated in any of their programming or the promotion thereof, in any manner and in any medium or forum, whether now known or hereafter devised, without payment to you or any third party"...

So, by the simple act of submitting a photo to them (*just* submitting. They don't even have to publish it where you had hoped to have it published!), you waive your rights. They can take your photo of little Johnny, "license" or "sublicense" it to a stock photography company who sell it to a client of theirs. Then one day you're driving down Hollywood Boulevard and look up to see little Johnny on a billboard the size of a farmhouse with the caption "When my anal warts flair up, I always reach for ButtItchBeGone! It's anal-riffic(tm)!!"

(While specifically targeting photo TOS, it should be mentioned that some crappy TOS cover much more than just photos. For example, today's example, CNN, also applies the TOS to their "Send us your vehicle of the future designs". If you happen to have some revolutionary new idea/design/concept, they're well within their rights to take your idea, sell it to Detroit (or Japan, more than likely), reap the rewards, and leave you wondering why you just gave away the farm.

So people, just watch what you submit and where. It could come back to bite you one day.

Skillz...

...I may lack. But it's not for a lack of trying.

Obviously, I'm far from the master yet. But for my first,



second,



and third,



attempts at artistic smoke photography, I'm not *entirely* unhappy. Sure, there's lots of room for improvement. But for shooting in my studio (some might call it "my bathroom with a thin piece of black fabric taped to the wall") and using my Sigma flash as an off-camera slave, instead of real studio lights, and relying on the bathroom vent fan to pull the acrid smoke out of the confined workspace, I think they came out OK.

Improvements for next time: beg/borrow/steal (maybe buy) a heavier piece of fabric to use as a backdrop. And make sure it's flat-flat black. Not this semi-gloss thing I have now. The flash kinda reflected off of it, making it look gray. Secondly, burn a bunch of incense sticks at a time (sorry honey). Burning a single stick just doesn't create the volume of smoke necessary for good photos.

I'm sure there's more to consider, but that's all I got for the moment. I'm out.

Holy crap!

These might be my favorite "artistic" photos ever:

http://sensitivelight.com/smoke2/

I'm not usually one for abstract art, but these photos of smoke are beautiful. I gotta get me some incense, lights, black/white backgrounds and colored gels and give this a try at home. I'm inspired.

Found via boingboing.net, via the MAKE blog, via Photocritic

Evil? Genius? Evil Genius!

I have a strange love/hate relationship with advertisers, their product, their methods, and the innovative ways they find to feed us consumers the idea that we can't live without their wares. There are some aspects of advertising that fascinate me. I have no idea why. I don't particularly *like* advertising. Matter of fact, I downright *dislike* most of it. I prefer TV shows commercial-free on DVD, and the FFW button on my DVR gets a workout constantly. I *hate* stupid TV commercials (which, sadly, is about 99.95% of them). They seem aimed at the least-bright 1% of us. And commercials played in front of movies in the theater make my head explode. I mean, seriously, if they were subsidizing my ticket prices, then maybe, *just maybe*. But with ticket prices in my town over $10 each now, they ain't subsidizing shit besides the theater's coffers.

However, product placement in movies is one area that interests me. The idea that nearly everything we see in a movie has been paid for I find fascinating. I love when it's done well. Movies for me occasionally become a "Where's Waldo" game of finding random products in a scene. I would love to know what it costs to have that pen lying on the desk, on camera for no more than five seconds, be a Bic pen as opposed to any other type of pen. However, when it's done ham-handedly, like the scene in the toy shop in "Jurassic Park", or the entire movie "I, Robot", I think it's an abomination.

I also usually dig "Hey, I didn't even know that was an ad!" advertising. I was not terribly impressed with the TV show "Lost"'s attempt at innovative advertising. It was interesting for a minute, then annoying.

Which brings me (in a roundabout way) to the latest issue of Outdoor Photographer magazine. It arrived in the mail a few weeks back. Like so many other OP issues, and indeed countless other photography mags in general, it had a nice background image, overlaid with a "new and improved" product of some variety. I gave the cover a quick once-over...blah blah blah Epson makes a new well-reviewed printer that I can't afford, yeah yeah, nothing new there...



.
.
.

Then I turned to page two:

.
.
.



where the enormity of the advertising ruse was revealed.

I can't imagine the balls it takes

1)for a marketing goon...er...rep to present that to the editors

2)for the editors to actually go along with it!

I mean, seriously? To sell out your cover. 100%. Totally? Front and back heavy stock glossy paper cover. Sold to the highest bidder (this month, Epson!). Man, I wish there were some kind of footnote to tell us what that cost Epson.

USAF

I took a drive down to the new US Air Force Memorial in Arlington, Virginia last night. I'd seen it from afar and thought it would be cool to photograph. I got a few that I'm really pretty happy with. The first two are below. I still have some hopefuls in my "to be post-processed" folder. Click on the images below to see the slightly larger versions.





Honestly, I think my shots are better than 99% of the shots of the memorial out there right now. And I'm not really one to say that kinda stuff. Before going to the memorial, I did a bunch of Googling to see if I could find the best angles/shots and get general ideas for how to shoot that behemoth. The shots that are out there are pretty limited. (You listening, Air Force Memorial Association? I'm not above selling out my images. Just say the word. We'll talk).

Anyway, the third shot presented here is my first attempt at a High Dynamic Range composite shot. Basically, you take a number of shots of a scene altering the shutter speed each time (leaving the aperture constant), so you capture the full range of brightness of a scene, from almost featureless black shadows to almost featureless white highlights. You then use software to merge all of these images together into what you see here:



When you create the HDR image, there are a few adjustable settings. I decided to go for a more surreal look to the photo, than real. Not bad for a first try. It definitely seems like a cool technique to play with.

Oh, the wife and I also took a quick overnight trip to NYC just before xmas. Took the kid and the niece. It was a great trip, but I wish we'd have had more time to roam the city. A few of my snaps can be seen here. I have a bunch more to post process. (See my last post re: motivation and hibernation).

We drove up early Saturday. Stayed over in Jersey. Ferried to NYC. Roamed the south end of the island. Had lunch in some random little cafe. Cabbed it up to Rockefeller Center. Saw the crowds. Saw the tree. Saw the light show on the side of the building. Roamed through Saks for a bit to warm up. Then, under protest, I dragged the family up to 76th St(?) and Fifth Ave to check out the Apple store. Took some quick snaps (not as nice as the official Apple snaps above). Cabbed it back to the ferry. Ferried back to the Jersey. Crashed for the night, then drove home Sunday.

*whew*

Weekend shooting

I managed to get away to Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge just south of Cambridge, MD this past weekend. First time there since last October. I really dig that place. Since it was my first time out there in a long while, I decided to mini-splurge and rent a $1300 Canon 100-400mm "L" lens. Wish I could have *really* splurged and bought that *ucker!

Being winter, there wasn't a whole lot of activity, but I did manage to get a few shots of the locals (click on the images below to see the full-sized version):


This bald eagle took off from his perch on the top branch and came straight towards me...


...before looping around and giving me a couple of nice fly-bys. (Interesting to note the different intensity of the blue sky. These shots were taken seconds apart, but at different angles to the sun. I'm guessing that's why one is blue-blue and the other is washed-out-blue.


On the other side of the refuge I found this juvenile bald eagle hanging out in the tree.


And this endangered Delmarva Fox Squirrel with a mouth full of leaves for the nest (s)he was building.


Yet another eagle flyby.

In what was to be the second worst missed opportunity of the weekend, I nearly caught this eagle in an aptly-named "Klingon Bird of Prey" pose. If only the focus would have locked (operator error).



However, by far the worst missed opportunity of the weekend came Sunday morning. I got to the refuge late (about 8:30am) and took a drive through. Not seeing much going on, I decided to roam the MD countryside for a while. When I returned, Wildlife Drive (the main loop through the refuge) was closed. I went to the visitor's center to ask why. Turns out there was an injured bald eagle in the refuge, and the head ranger and a vet were going to try and capture it so they could take it to an eagle rehab facility. I asked if there was any way she (the woman I was talking to...who was wearing a ranger outfit) could get me in to the refuge to act as an official photographer for them. I told her it could make a really cool PR piece for the refuge. I said I'd stay well out of the way, and I'd do whatever the ranger said to. I also offered them full rights to any shots I got. She thought it sounded like a good idea, and called the head ranger on his cell phone to ask if it wold be possible. Unfortunately, the overly-litigious society did me in. He said that due to "liability reasons", it wouldn't be possible. I told him (through her) that I promised I wasn't one of those idiots who sued other people when I did dumb things and hurt myself (and I'd told my family to behave the same way if I managed to kill myself). And I offered to sign anything they put in front of me as a permission slip/waiver of liability/whatever. Sadly, he wouldn't budge. He said "maybe if I'd have been a volunteer". So I asked where to sign up. Roadblocked again...the woman who handles the volunteer sign-ups worked Monday through Friday. Damn!

So, instead of hanging around the visitor's center for an unknown amount of time, I decided to drive out to the far side of the refuge and see what I could find (which is where I got the juvenile bald eagle seen above). A decent shot, but not nearly as cool as what could have been.

Needless to say, I have the volunteer information open in a web browser as I type. The next time I'm at the refuge and there's an injured bald eagle rescue going on, I'll be set!