Grandchildren came today Hooray

Well I had my oldest son come today and his family. 
I got a pretty good panning shot of them on the four wheeler riding around the yard. (The blur effect was taken by the camera not done in photoshop.)

We also got ot see what my son wore all day at work for Halloween. A pretty big Ginger Bread Man.


We had fun and of course I worked while they played but I stopped for awhile when my oldest grandson started to play in the leaves. I don't know how he took it under that pile of leaves but he seemed to really enjoy it until he came up spitting out a mouthful of them.





The youngest one just loved to play with the broom and was helping by sweeping the leaves from the grass, when he could hold the broom up.

And we hated to say good bye but we all get tired at some point and the youngest had pretty well hit that point. The older one was still telling me about something also but I didn't quite catch it like I didn't quite catch him. I was still a little too high for the flash to illuminate his entire face.

Halloween Sunrise Over Springville 2008

I arrived at work long before sunrise and was doing my job in an area where I can't see the eastern skies as the sunrises. However there are fellow employees that know I will go out and take pictures if they tell me what they want photographed as they come in to work. It happened just that way yesterday as one employee mentioned how beautiful the sunrise was as she was coming in that morning. I quickly grabbed my camera which I always keep by my work station and began a sequence of the Halloween Sunrise of 2008.  You can see major color variations and these are cause by two things: The time or in other words angle of the sun in relations to the clouds and the second being my camera settings.  

THEY ALL LEAD TO SOMETHING

I have been searching through my CD's for a friend to give him some pictures that I took about 5 years ago. In fact, it was the second day that I had my first digital camera the Canon 10D. (I was on my way to a wedding that I would photograph that weekend and knew I had enough time, in fact had planned for enough time, to go and take a few pictures.) I knew that I had them but it wasn't until I had gone through all of my CD's and DVD's and finally turned to the 13 spindles full of spare CD's that I found them when going through the 6th spindle. In other words I had kind of sorted through 599 CD's when I found that they were in my first batch of 100 but I had started with #6 knowing they couldn't be any earlier than that. I was glad I found them and so I decided to put a few on my blog and save the rest for my Good Morning images.

So I started this blog with the title "They All Lead To Something", knowing that I had planned to put some pictures of trails on my blog first. Those of you who have been here may instantly recognize where this is leading you but for the rest of you I'll just leave you in suspense. (Ya right, not a whole lot of suspense in pictures of trails unless they are along the side of a cliff.)
These were all part of the same trail though and I photographed most of them after I had been to the end of the trail and was returning to the car. I get things backwards like that quite often.

I decided that day though that I had the ability with the new camera to take hundreds of more pictures of this place than I could have had I used film and I also felt like the trail to this scene was as much a part of the scene as the scene  itself. I mean what is life if you don't enjoy the journey and this trail represents a journey of sorts for all of us.

Parts of this journey led fairly close to the edge of the cliff you might say (and there is the suspense) but yet by staying directly on it I felt absolutely no fear and I am the kind of a guy that does not live on the edge so it was a good feeling for me not to fear.

Well if you haven't figured it out yet from the little glimpses of the future that you can see from the trail then in the next image it should be very obvious where this trail is located.

It is at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. What a magnificent view but I couldn't have had it had I not traveled that trail. 

Enjoy the view. Of course this is only a small part of what can actually be seen at the North Rim but it still gives a feel for the open spaces that it occupies.

I do actually accomplish other things.

I do a lot of photography but on occasion I do accomplish other things as well. Since we had a new lawn mower (my other ones are all raised and gone so I had to get one old folks could use) I had to have a place to store it during the bulk of the year when it isn't used. And I also needed a better place than under a blue tarp to store the four wheeler that my father-in-law gave to me. (Last year it was stored under a blue tarp and the year before that in the back of my large van that I was driving to work at the time.) So last saturday I had help from three of my sons and a fourth one in spirit who would have been helping except he was studying dentistry in Colorado This post is actually for him since he wanted to see it. So there you have my full saturdays project. 2 and a half hours of it was trying to figure out a 3-12 slope for the roof when attaching it to an existing roof with a 10-12 slope. My 9th grade geometry has slipped a little over the years. I almost finished it saturday but had to go back Tuesday and tonight to finish putting the shingles on the roof. Now it is almost done. I just have to get a tarp to put down in the front and some expanding foam to seal the cracks on the side.

Not enough time to play

I decide to put these two images on the my blog tonight because I have been working on these and not my painting. There just isn't enough time. But it was fun anyway.  College kids just have fun.

Starting on more

So I haven't gone very far but I can see unlimited possibilities as I continue to learn Corel Painter. This is one where the computer generated this base image that I will later use to build on into a painting as I learn more of what to do. It is a lot of fun but also takes a lot of time so I am also relearning patience in this process.

Wild Things

Photographing wild things I believe has as much to do with luck as it does with skill. Obviously you have to develop the skill sets so that when the lucky part comes along you can capture the sheer glory and beauty of the moment but that moment can come at any time and you have to be ready.
In the following images I was intent on taking pictures of the ducks on a stream that I had passed by a few days earlier and had not had time to stop. I went back on an early saturday, cold, morning. As I drove past the stream I noticed a lot of ducks in one area so I pulled off the road, out of sight from the ducks, and got my equipment ready and then went over to where they were lazily swimming in the brisk morning air. There was a nice mist coming from off the water which was an added bonus but one that I had hoped would be there. What I wasn't expecting however was that the moment that I appeared in their view they would take to flight and the lazy attitude of swimming that I had hoped to catch would be gone in an instant. I threw my camera up to my eye and started firing as fast as I could and when I looked at the pictures later was pleasantly surprised by the image lady luck had put in front of my lens. I don't think that I could repeat these images again but am glad that I have them.