kodiak

Trondheim!

Today I ventured out with my camera for a while and took a few shots while exploring town. I will be here for about a month, so I can take my time. One big perk about being this far north is that you have “interesting” light all day. The best light for landscape photography is near dawn and dusk, and that is about all you get here- 4 -5 hours of dusk. An even bigger perk is that you don’t have to wake up early to get it!

Windsurfing at Shoreline

Ryan, Jane, Nick, Maureen and myself all headed out to Shoreline last Sunday for a little windsurfing. Jane and I didn’t surf, but I took the opportunity to snap a couple shots of the others out on the water. Enjoy!

New lenses on the way!

After considering other options in the range for a little while, I decided to add this 20mm f/2.8 prime to my bag of lenses. At 20mm it is moderately wide angle, but not a fisheye or anything crazy like that, but it should be great for landscape shots, especially at low light. I cannot wait to try it out!

The other lens is the classic 70-210 Nikon zoom. This lens has been around for a while and one of the best mid-level zoom lenses out there- but of course Nikon decided to stop making it a couple years ago, so they are harder to find these days. I have a 70-300 from Sigma that I do like, but I find the auto focus hunts a little and is not particularly fast. That is fine for flowers, but not so great for sports.

Both lenses are coming from eBay, so let’s hope for minimum drama on that front. Fingers crossed!

Day off at Hakone Gardens

Hakone Gardens is a traditional Japanese garden located near Big Basin, just outside of Saratoga. Given that I had Monday off from work and that the weather was simply amazing, I decided to check out the gardens and work on some of my photography technique. It was a nice couple hours in away from everything- so peaceful. I was hoping that it would be more reminiscent of the Japanese gardens in Portland, and to a certain extent it was, but the visit to Hakone Gardens has convinced me to bring my camera home for the weekend to try and shoot in Portland, but first I need to get a tripod!

Enjoy the photos, and as always- feedback is more than welcome.

Someday …

I will take photos like these. In the mean time I will have to be happy with making this NIO code work …

UPDATED: Winking Lotus Half Moon Bay

Gabe, Julie, and I headed over the hill to Half Moon Bay for a Winking Lotus Decompression party this evening. While Gabe, Julie, nor myself actually went to Burning Man this year, we still felt the need to decompress, and what better place? The evening included an amazing 3D slide show of this year’s festivities, a trance room, a chill out room and tons of flaming poi spinning and other fire related activities. I took just over 400 photos tonight, so it might take a while to edit them into a set. For now you can enjoy the crappy snap of the fire from my phone :-)

UPDATE: The photos are now online in a set at my flickr account. Just click the photo to head that way …

They’re Moo-tastic!

I took Moo and Flickr up on their offer of 10 free Moo-mini cards a couple of weeks ago, and today they arrived. I have to admit the card stock is fantastic and feels great. The holder for the cards (also made of the same stock) is also kinda cute. It sort of makes it seems like a little pack of chewing gum… just don’t try and chew these. They are a little starchy.

Jelly Belly!

I went ahead and bought the cheapo Sigma telephoto lens after talking to a couple people about there experiences with it. It is not the *best* lens you can get, but for $130 shipped- it ain’t half bad either. This is a cropped shot that I took from across the kitchen at jar of jelly beans that magically appeared in the house today.