My photo Ably-tross won Photo Of The Week over at Ride Scooters blog.

Well, it's been a very busy summer and while I've taken a lot of pictures, I haven't done a lot of "photography". I make that distinction because I view a division between photography for art and photography for documentation and memories of events. Sometimes the line is blurred and a photo can be both, but I haven't done as much art photography this summer as I would have liked. Here are a few photos that I experimented with while in San Francisco in April for DrupalCon. The photos aren't stellar, but it was my first experiment with both HDR (3-exposure composites)...

We are heading up to Seattle (specifically, Renton…okay, more specifically, Tukwila) to take our son to a freestyle scooter competition and I didn't want to have to haul around my big tripod. However, I also know that for sports, using a fast shutter speed, to get crisp (or "crispin" as my son calls it) photos, you need to be stable. I've wanted a monopod for a while, but I didn't want to spend a ton of money for my first one. As it was last minute, my options were pretty limited, but I found a Manfrotto 776YB monopod and a Sunpak MagMount ball head (MAGMOUNT-B) that...

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I took my step-son to scooter at the THPRD skate park on 158th, as we often do, and I brought my camera to capture some of the images that I wanted to shoot after my last session. I had a few shots that I wanted to go back and redo and I got to explore some new opportunities as well. Unfortunately, a lot of the skate park shots didn't turn out as well as I would have hoped. I'm not sure if I had the shutter too slow or if my zoom lens just isn't fast enough for good sports photography, but they turned out very soft. I was shooting in shutter priority mode at 1/640th for most of the...

We took my step-son, Paxton, and a friend of his out to the Meldrum Bar park to hit some of the bicycle dirt jumps. Unfortunately, a lot of the smaller kid-friendly jumps had been replaced with an RC car track, which is cool, but not what the kids were hoping for. We didn't even have our RC cars with us. So the kids were left to try some of the bigger full-size jumps and a few smaller ones. While the day wasn't the best for the kids riding, I met a couple of adult dirt jumpers, John and Ryan, who were equally friendly and talented, and they agreed to let me shoot their session. If I was...

Once again, this shoot was at lunch with David from Fogpuddle Photography, this time at the Tualatin Hills park on 158th in Beaverton. This set took a lot of work to get something usable. I actually had several shots that were really close to being something good, but not quite there. At least I have some ideas of what to shoot next time I go back. There is a great skatepark here at this location, but I decided against shooting sports this time. I also had my first encounter with a Western Scrub-Jay since getting my camera. I saw him only briefly and then lost him in some brush. Scrub-Jays have...

I had the desire to shoot this evening, but I didn't want to go anywhere, so I just started snapping photos of my pets. They were either completely disinterested and wouldn't look at the camera or, in Darby's case, they wanted to get right in front of it. These photos helped me learn "big aperture + flash = black background", which is a pretty cool effect, in my opinion.

I had tried astrophotography the week prior to this shoot, but I didn't have a remote shutter release and being able to not bump the camera by hitting the shutter button really made a difference. Astrophotography just blows my mind. Being able to capture an image of the most awesome (as in "to be full of awe", not just cool) and humbling human experience, Space, is just incredible. I hope to be able to get a telescope someday and capture some even more amazing images.

This is another shoot that my friend David from Fogpuddle Photography and I did at lunch one day. This time, we explored the Tektronix campus in Beaverton. Once again, I didn't feel like this was a very successful outing until I started pouring over the images in Lightroom and making some post-production tweaks.

My friend David from Fogpuddle Photography and I took a long lunch and went to Commonwealth Park in Beaverton on a cloudy day to have some photo fun. It started out seeming like we weren't going to end up with much success, but after wading through 100+ images in Lightroom and making some post-production tweaks, I think I got some pretty good photos. This was the first time I'd experimented with AV (Aperture Value/Priority) mode on my camera. Being able to control the depth of field this easily was a really powerful discovery for me. I like being able to force the viewers perspective...

This shoot at the Tualtin Hills Nature Park in Beaverton was the first time I'd shot outside. There's not a whole lot of diversity at this nature park as it's a lot of dense forest filled with ferns, moss, and trees. The more open shots were all taken on the outskirts of the nature park, which provided some more interesting material and better backgrounds. Still learning my new camera, I had to do a lot of experimentation on this shoot learning how to balance the settings in manual mode and discovering just how drastically the white balance settings impact the image.