Photo Contest Winner

I recently entered a photo contest sponsored ny the New York Institute for Photography. One of the photo's I entered has been selected as one of the top 16 photo's, which is pretty cool. They are going to be printing and framing the photo in a 16 x 20 size and displaying it along with all the other winning photo's at 11 Madison Ave. in new York city from October 22 through Nov. 2. They should be selecting the overal grand prize winner shortly with the top prise being a trip to New York and some nice photo gear. This was the photo I entered.

We had some family over to the house this Labor day and it was a great opportunity to take some photo's. Our nephews son was being a bit shy with the camera at 1st, then he turned into a camera ham and you would of though he had a modeling career. I used an off camera flash and he was pretty intrigued at it. This is one of the shots as he looked into the flash that was sitting on the coffee table...

Jumping for joy!

Rachel and I had some fun a couple of days before School started. We headed out to the back yard and Rachel had a blast on the trampoline. She jumped and I shot. She was doing what she loved and so was I. I took about a hundred shots of her jumping and spinning shooting in continuous mode. My camera shoots at about 3 frames per second but it was still very challenging to get the perfect shot. This one was one of my favorites, I just wished I didn't crop the top of her hair. I would love to hear your thoughts on this shot.

HDR

This is a shot of the golf course at the Grand Cypress Resort in Orlando. It was my 1st attempt at HDR which stands for High Dynamic Range. It is a composit of 6 different shots ranging from 3 stops over exposed to 3 stops under exposed.

Portraits

It is senior time for my daughter Meghan and that means time for some senior portraits. So, the other day we set up camp in the family room at the house and set up a mini studio. I had purchased some material from the fabric store and tacked it up to the wall and set up a couple of off camera flashes. Here are a couple of the shots...You can here to view a slide show of more of the shots...

Meghan

Well, Yesterday brought quite a scare! I went to book up the old computer in the morning and got this error message that said...Corrupt windows root>sysytem32/hal.dll please reload file before rebooting. The hard drive was not looking good. After a search online on another computer searching that error message, I was left with a very sick sinking feeling. I have told myself dozens of times to make sure I back up my files, and read horror stories online of people who haven't. I would always get around to it or do it next time I had some more time...as you know that time never seems to come around. I did however invest in a 400GB external hard drive and may have backed up a fraction of my photo files, but thats about it....Thanks so much to Harold at work, in out IT department. He broke out the old defibrulator and somehow rebuilt Windows XP without losing my files! WHEH! I can breath again. Needless to say, I will be spending quite a bit of time backing up files and looking for a software product that can do this automatically. Here is a recent shot that I almost lost...

Limkin, aka "the Kirate Kid"

I recently caught this shot of a Limkin at Saddle Creek park in Lakeland, Florida. It really reminded me of the scene from the Kirate Kid movie...I must not get out much.

New Flower shots

Ok, it's been a while since I posted here so it is time to put up some stuff. Life has certainly not been slowing up with kids out of school. I had the recent pleasure of spending the day with my brother Marc and we drive around Lakeland and Winter Haven shooting fence photo's. At the last house we stopped at, aw we were leaving, I noticed this small garden between by the driveway and had to take some shots with my 50mm lens. I love this lens as it takes some of the best shots you can imagine. This is one of the shots after I cropped in quite a bit in photoshop and thought the image came out looking quite nice. I suppose I ought to post a fence shot as well.....