An adventure on the way home from work.

Well I had an accident on the way home tonight from work. I was very blessed in that I got out of the car as soon as I came to a stop. I was coming toward the intersection of Maple and 1600 West (by the Conoco and Model A Cafe) when a truck pulled out in front of me trying to cross from the west side to the east onto Maple. He was driving a chevy truck that was made to carry glass on the sides as you can probably envision. Well I looked at my options in the fraction of a second that I had before certain impact. Having had this happen once before in my life I only hoped that I could be as blessed ( I was going to say lucky but I know better). So I swerved to the right since the truck appeared to be moving forward and going left would have put me right into his cab, a place I didn't want to be since I wasn't really that excited to meet him that way. Well as I went right I went into a slide and was not able to get around him but because I was pushing on the brakes the front end of the car was slanted well toward the ground. So I went under the very back end of his truck breaking off about 2 and a half feet of a piece of 2x10 board that was used to walk on while loading the glass. I was glad that I was in the saturn since it was built low to the ground on the front end and thus went clear under the truck and as you will be able to tell from the following picture it actuall slid the truck off of the car before it went through the windshield where I was sitting. Yes, I was truly blessed, far better than being lucky.

Here is just a note to put into the back of your brain so that it becomes an instinct rather than something you have to think about when the situation comes up. The investigating officer told me that I had made the right choice by veering to the right and not the left. Now why would that matter, well going to the left would have put me into the traffic which was quite active since it was when everyone was on their way home. The traffic was very heavy. Once again I was not lucky I was blessed.

Family Pictures in a field

Recently a young wife of one of my former Boy Scouts called and asked me to do their family pictures. We hadn't determined a place to do it until I called that morning and she suggested doing it in a field behind their house. I didn't know what to expect until I got over there but it didn't take long to survey the field and realize it would be a great place to take family pictures. Here are some of the results.

I knew that I wanted to capture the color of the golden grass but even with a fill flash the background easily blew out when I tried to get good lighting on the faces of each child. I decided to let photoshop help and worked on just getting a good exposure that I could work with and then in photoshop exposed the picture for the grass and with the new adjustment tool in CS4 Bridge brought the needed light back into the faces. Needless to say it was a lot of fun doing this photoshoot.

Art Show Fun

This weekend I participated in an Art Show in Mapleton. There were 25 contributing artist and sculptures. I was first invited last year and surprised at how much free time I had during the day on friday and this year was about the same. It was very relaxing and a great break from the 10 plus hours I spend at work each day. I got there early an Friday to find the doors still locked so I went on a photo walk for a few minutes. It had snowed during the wee morning hours and was a bit cold but I went anyway and then went back home and got some winter boots and warmer socks. It was very beautiful on that walk however and the snow on things gave a whole different perspective from what we had last year when the weather was a very warm fall day.

A little later in the morning I decided to go out behind the barn where the event was taking place to a pond and do a little more photographing. (I find that to be extremely relaxing.) Anyway as I was there I saw two Canadian Geese and went to photograph them. The pictures here are backwards from the actual sequence of photographing. They first had been on the grass as I walked toward them and so they slid into the pond but when I seemed intent on taking their pictures they decided to fly away. So the first pictures here are where they are circling around above me before leaving. I felt pretty lucky to get a couple fairly good shots before they left.

Around noon I had a friend come over who wanted to learn more about photography. He just bought a new camera and was there to learn to use it so we went for another photo walk. It was really fun being with someone who was so anxious to learn and who also appears to have a great eye for it as well. We took around 200 images and had a lot of fun. It was much warmer so it was easy to stay out a little longer and look for a lot of things that I hadn't had the chance to look at that morning.

I found a rock with some crystal formation so I had to try using my 6 point star filter. I got a little bit of a star from it. You have to look closely.