Wow, only 12 photos left until my project is complete.  I can’t believe it, this year has just flown by.  I had a busy week this week as my main computer which I do all of my photo editing died last Sunday (luckily I had last week’s photo already scheduled to post).  So I spent a lot of time this week building and setting up my new machine.  This didn’t leave much time for me to get out and shoot, but I did manage to get some time in today.  This is my favorite time of year.  I have always loved fall, with all of the leaves changing colors and the great weather we finally get in central Illinois.  I decided to try and capture some of nature’s beauty of the season.  I will also probably try and squeeze in more fall pictures while the season lasts, but we’ll see what happens.

“Autumn”

There were so many pictures from Las Vegas to choose from it was once again difficult to pick just one (however the you can find the rest over in my Picasa web albums).  This one was a fun one to shoot.  Bellagio’s fountain goes off periodically and put on a great water and light show.  There is just something about watching a water show in the middle of the desert that is pleasantly ironic.  Lugging my tripod wasn’t too bad since it came with a nice carry case and it is pretty light, so snagging a long-exposure of the water show was pretty easy.  This particular shot was exposed for 1 second with an aperture of f/5.6

“Oasis”

Constructed from 1931 through 1936 during the Great Depression, Hoover Dam is primarily a method of water reclamation, to supply water to California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming.  It is built in Boulder Canon, on the Nevada and Arizona border.  The Dam’s hydroelectric turbines, generating 4.2 billion killowatt hours of electricity a year for Nevada, Arizona, and California, is a bonus to the Dam’s main purpose of water reclamation.

My wife and I were fortunate enough to be able to come to Las Vegas, and there was absolutely no way I was going to miss out on one of the great engineering accomplishments in the world while I was here.  It is simply amazing.

The photo is a panoramic photo, stitched together from three separate images.

“Hoover Dam”

I didn’t have a lot of free time this week to get out and go shooting due to some personal matters I had to attend to, but never the less I got out and shot some photos around the lake today.  After getting back home and looking through everything I just hated everything I shot.  I didn’t like a darn one.  As I sat at my desk pondering what to do when something caught my eye.  The glass container I throw my change in every day.  Something so simple, but also symbolic in a strange way I had never even considered before.  I dug out my light box and lights and started shooting.  I ended up with a photo I actually like quite a lot, a pleasant turn-around from where I was earlier.

“American Love”

This photo is from Labor Day this week.  The car is a 1989 Saleen Mustang, #503, meticulously restored over the last year by my wife’s uncle.  He put a lot of effort in to restoring this beautiful car to its former glory, down to every last detail.  He took it to a local car show on Labor Day and won first place in his category.  I’ve always had a thing for the Fox Body style Mustang, and this one has easily become one of my favorites.

“Saleen”

What is better than the weekend?  How about a holiday weekend!  It is September already and Labor Day weekend is upon us.  I had the opportunity to head out to the Kincaid Labor Day weekend fair.  Kincaid is a small town (population is less than 2,000), but it seems the small towns know how to have the most fun.  That was definitely the case with their Labor Day fair.  While they have many events going on over the whole weekend, including bands and a car show, I decided to go to their tug-of-war competition today (and might go out to the car show tomorrow).  My Uncle-in-law was in it, so that was a good enough excuse for me to head out and shoot some photos.  I shot over 300 photos over the course of about three hours.  With so many shots to go through it was tough to narrow it down to just one.  I ended up going with this one because of the action it captured.  From the dirt kicking up on the ground to the struggle in their faces.  I also spent some time manually selecting out the team and adjusting the background’s levels a bit to make them pop out of their surroundings.  I like how it turned out a lot!

“War”

This is a shot I have been wanting to do since the beginning, and Friday night finally provided me with the right weather conditions and opportunity to go out and try and get this shot.  This one was definitely a learning experience as much as it was a shooting experience.  First important thing I learned when attempting a very long exposure like this one: check your focus with a quick 5 minute exposure before going in for the long haul!!!  I didn’t do this (I thought I had it right) and a 45 minute exposure was completely worthless as the focus was way off.  It is very hard to focus through a tiny view finder in to pitch black nothingness.  The stars are all but impossible to see through it.  After my failure I tested a 5 minute exposure on the brightest thing in the sky, which actually turned out to be Jupiter!  It was kind of cool and I didn’t expect that at all, but when I held my Google Sky Maps app up to what was the brightest thing in the sky, it was definitely Jupiter.  So, after getting my focus right I made another attempt.  I like the image but it could have been better.  First off, my camera’s sensor was getting pretty hot due to the multiple long exposures I had tried before this one.  Plus it’s August.  This heat caused a lot of digital noise in the image, despite my 100 ISO setting.  Second thing was the 25 minute exposure.  I would have liked have gone for an hour, but because of my first missed opportunity it ended up being close to 1a.m. for this exposure.  This meant the night’s dew was setting in and my lens was starting to fog up.  I had to call it quits.

Like I said, despite the problems, I still like this image a lot.  And hey, the point of this project is to force me to learn new things, and I definitely learned a lot this go around.

“Star Trek”

This weekend my wife’s cousin was married.  I decided to rent a lens for the wedding and reception just to play around and see what one of Canon’s L-Series lenses was like.  I went with the 24-70 f/2.8 lens.  While I wasn’t overly thrilled with the lens in general I did get some beautiful shots out of it.  This was my favorite of the evening, the wedding topper on their cake.  Congratulations Lindsay and Leroy!

“L&L”