Highland Mighty Mite Football - Slide Show

My website host (SmugMug) has a new feature were one can create a slideshow of a gallery and they create the code that can simply be pasted into another application. The slideshow below only took a minute to create. If you click on the slideshow or image it will then take you to the gallery. Its something new. It might lead to some more blog posts.

Last week's game (Highland vs Alta Mighty Mite) can be seen here on my website.

Late Night Fly Fishing

My father, brother and I were able to get out after work for the first fly fishing trip of the year. I dragged the camera along to see if I can fish and shoot at the same time. Short answer, no. I was able to get a few shots off and catch a fish after missing two pretty clean hits earlier. All shots were after the sun went down. Needless to say, all were handheld and a tripod would of been helpful.

The Tour of Utah - Stage 1

The Tour of Utah finished their first stage yesterday at Research Park after coming down Emigration Canyon. I managed to get out of the office and run up to the mouth of the canyon to catch the racers. A few more photographs can be seen on my website. Also on my website is a lot of the support cars.
I slowed the shutter speed down to 1/250 and panned with the racers to create the blurred background and their spokes blurr out. It gives a nice feeling of speed. It is definitely harder to capture, however, I think it makes a better photograph.

The main pack coming out of the canyon.

Here are the eventual winner and second place finishers, Paco Mancebo (Rock Racing) and Oscar Sevilla (Rock Racing). They of course came out of the canyon first. I wanted to make sure I captured them so I shot a shutter speed around 1/2000, thus you can see the spokes clearly.

Backyard Visitors

In the past few weeks I have not been able to get out to shoot an event, so I have focused on my backyard. Here are few a visitors:
The bee is in a hosta flower. I was shooting the flowers until the bees came along.

We have a very large butterfly bush (about eight feet tall and six feet wide) and the name holds true. During the last two years we had a lot of humming birds come to it, but this year nothing.

This I found out through a Google search is an Asian Lady Bettle, thus the orange, yellow color instead of the native red. They were introduced on purpose in the west and are taking over the red ladybug.

Beauty Dish - DIY / Lightroom

I followed the instructions of David Tejada (click on his name for the link to his blog) to create my own beauty dish fired by my SB800. The instructions are pretty simple and once one visits Home Depot for the parts, the pictures make more sense. I would not recommend painting the gray gutter part as it makes it harder to glue velco to it. The mirror I left out and used a CD instead. The impact of the mirror cannot be that great and David mentions that as well. For the velco I used some of our broken Hit-A-Way straps (we burn through one a season). Those are probably a little over kill. The first test shots were of my wife which she made me delete and deservedly so. My garden is always willing to model and never complain, so below is one of our many daylilies. Nikon D300, 70-200 2.8, SB800 through DIY beauty dish fired by Nikon's CLS. There is also a little sharpening and color bump in Adobe's Lightroom.

I received Lightroom for Father's Day and find it is the best thing about digital photography (aside from taking a ton of pictures). Wade Heninger was kind enough to do a free Lightroom for starters last week and it helped me really understand the basis of the software (we spoke techie/geek talk). It was made for photographer and is laid out the way a photographer thinks. Photoshop is not. You will see his name on the third line of developers when you open Lightroom.

He now works for SmugMug (another favorite of mine) and passed out new camera straps and hats (with the SmugMug Pro logo of course).

Newport Beach, California

Our family vacation this year was a trip to see my sister then my whole family (21 in all) spent a week in Newport Beach. One day was just for Disneyland and the rest of the time was completely unscheduled.

At least one night is spent at the Balboa Pier and more importantly at the Fun Zone for the family competition of Skee Ball. I posted a 340 this year as I was in the zone. We skipped the Farris wheel this year as we were heading to Disneyland the next day.

My son has the form of his father, great Skee Ball genes.

This was taken off of Newport Pier after getting some ice cream and Hawaiian ice at the Pipeline. There is public parking by the pier so it is always crowded, but as you move away the beaches are pretty open.

I missed the 2009 Oregon Quailifer due to this vacation, but plan to get out to the New Jersey event.