It Rained Last Night

We got three inches of rain last night hence, no Harvest Moon shot.  Tonight it is crystal clear.  Some  members in a photo club, www.focusphotoclub.com,  I belong to have some super long lenses or lenses with teleconverters where they can get great details of the moon.  I don't have but one lens, an 18mm-270mm Tamron, so I figure if you can't join them in detail then go in the opposite direction.  At 18mm this is what I got.  Also picked up the drapery reflection as well has my hand over the tower in the distance.

Getting Ready for Fall

This is from a Smoke Tree that I have trimmed to a bush.  The light was very low when I took this, nearly *8 PM.  I made my 18 - 270mm lens into a macro shooting at 270mm  1/60 shutter speed, f-6.3 and the ISO was 3200.  I accepted the fact that I would have some graininess, I actually wanted it.  What I really liked was how the sun, just a spot of light, caught the leaves.  By the way, I don't use a flash.  Only flash I have is the pop up on the camera and with this lens the flash is cut off.

This was the sun bouncing off the bottom of the clouds overhead.

Old Barn and Old Truck

A little Photoshop work.  A friend took this picture and I needed a something to try some texturing and what have you so I used his work.  Little crop here, some graininess there with some painting and this is what you get.  May not be for everyone but Gene, my buddy, and I like it.  May not be for everyone.

 

 

A Couple of Sunrise Shots

Been away from doing much on the Blog of late.  Bought a book on Lightroom 5 but haven't had much of an opportunity to take any shots then on day a fellow Focus Photo Club member put up a great picture of a road in the early morning where he took a great shot of the sun light coming through the trees.  This inspired me to take some photos. 


I almost lost this one with a blown out sky but was able to salvage it.  There's a little HDR thrown in and then edited to un-sharpen the effect.

 

 

 

This one looks like an edited on of the first but the sun would be in there.  It was taken just a few minutes earlier.  The sun rises very quickly so you have to be ready.  It would help to have two cameras set up differently, like if you wanted ND filters on like I did but things just change too fast.  So, I took an already pretty good silhouette picture and amped it up a tad.  I call this Metallic Sunrise.

 

One Step Closer

I'll jump in if you get any closer.

An Early Morning Visitor

The face of authority as is the eagle and falcon.

I got several shots of this hawk sitting on the deck railing.  The problem was that I didn't want to spook it by raising the blinds so all that could be done was to twist them open.  I didn't even know it was out there until my wife told me so I hurriedly retrieved the camera.  I edited it in PS to hide the lines from the blinds.  I love their faces.  A little HDR effect as well.  Possibly a Red Tail.  The two below are of a Coopers Hawk.  Much bigger bird.

This one was on the neighbors deck a couple of years ago.

This was last year.  A Robins nest was in the tree above it.  You can see one of the babies on the ground.  It became part of the noon day meal for this magnificent bird along with its two siblings.

Early Fall?

The weather this year has been just plain weird.  Lots of rain giving this area a bumper crop in soy beans and corn.  The farmer markets have some really nice produce.  Last year we were begging for rain.

We've only had one week of temps in the 90's.  Most of the summer has seen daily temps in the mid to low 80's.  But this week we have ventured into what one would call FALL temps.  Today it barely climbed to the upper 70's and tomorrow is forecast to be 69 at noon and 71 at 4 PM. Tonight is forecast to be 49 degrees.  Whoaaaaa, only 17 more at we're at the freezing mark.

Great opportunity for some fantastic sky shots.


A morning ground fog shot with sun beam coming through the pines.