My original plan was to go to early church and then between first and second service there usually would be  no one in the sanctuary so I thought it would be a good time to make an HDR image of St. Lukes.  You cannot get the true feeling of the beauty of St. Lukes with artificial lighting and in my mind HDR would be the way to capture that beauty.

Then my wife reminded me that I hadn’t talked with the Pastor about my plan and the more I thought about it the more I knew she was right.  So I decided I’d do that next Saturday and then I looked out the back kitchen window and saw an early morning sun inter dispersed with a lot of low hanging clouds and I thought perfect shooting light.

So I grabbed the Nikon D300S, my Tamron 18-270mm lens, the tripod, and headed out.  I decided to just drive around Asbury (actually around the outskirts of Asbury) and see what lent itself to making some interesting images.

The image above is one of my wife’s favorite views and just a short piece from our house.  Actually when I’m riding my bike this is my normal route and it is at the top of a rather long hill, so I usually stop here and get a drink and catch my breath before continuing on.

This is a stream at the bottom of Twin Springs Hill, which is a popular spot for picking up the Heritage Trail.  I took this image in HDR using a tripod on a bridge and making five images.  Then I used the 1st, 2nd and 5th image (exactly 2 stops over and under exposed) to make this HDR image.

These great looking barns are just a few blocks from my house as well.  I didn’t even know they were there until today.  You have to take a side road to get to them and I was actually looking for some shots of the Meadows Golf Course when I came across these barns.  They were too good to pass up.

Speaking of the Meadows Golf Course, this was just 4 blocks from the barns above.  I wasn’t really looking to take images of any of the holes, but I liked the way this pond was framed by trees.   By the time I took this image the sun was just getting too high for the type of images I wanted to shoot and it was pretty obscured by some dark clouds so this was just about my last image.

Just a little past Asbury is the small village of Graf.  I happened into Graf and was going to turn around when I saw this lumber mill.  They had thousands of logs stacked up and I thought it would be great in black and white.

Finally coming back from Graf and just after the golf course I saw this silo (or what’s left of it) sitting off the main road down and the end of an abandon road.  I turned around and went back for this image.  I’ve live here 20 years and never saw this before, even from my bike.   Just goes to show that you have to take time to see what is around you.  Kind of a “stop and smell the roses?” Perhaps so.

Thanks for stopping by.

In October Thunderhills Country Club drops their guest restrictions and in town people can play as a guest through the month.  So my friend Mike Stoll invited me to play at 8:58 am with the temperature at a coolish 41 degrees and a slight wind.

Mike has been a great friend over the years and he and I are about the same skill level (which is basically no skill at all.)  His only real problem is that he attacks the ball from the wrong side.  I had played a month earlier and was not too unhappy with the way I was striking the ball.  That was last month.

Today was a completely different story.  I lost 5 balls in two holes.  It  didn’t get much better as the day wore on.  I made my first par on the 9th hole by draining a 45 foot putt.  Well okay it was at least 35 feet and downhill.

Here is Bob Rudzianski affectionately known as The Kink (that’s another story for another time.)  He was the medalist for the round but out of respect for him I will not post his score.  Today reminds me how I feel about golf.  I love being with my friends but I could have enjoyed them just as much at the truck stop having breakfast if you know what I mean. 🙂

The things I saw today were in black and white.  I don’t know why but that is just what caught my eye.  I was on my way back from Monticello and I could just see the church bell on this small church from the highway. [Okay I found out that this is not a church at all.  A friend at work informed me that this was once a school in Emeline, Iowa.  She and her husband are on a committee dedicated to preserving this building.  They are called “The Friends Of Emeline.”  She said that its current use is as a community center for some clubs, 4-H and a group of coon hunters.  They wanted to preserve the building but cannot restore it to the original look because of grant issues and qualifications.  She said that her husband went to school there until it closed in 1965.]

When I went down the county road to get a closer look it wasn’t much of a church from a purely architectural stand point but the bell on top and the rural setting made it look interesting.  I thought a black and white treatment might make a good image.

Down the road a bit was this old dilapidated farm all grown over in brush and weeds.  The barn was falling down and overgrown with weeds and even this windmill had vines and brush growing all over it.  I shot several images of the barn but couldn’t get an interesting perspective because of the overgrowth so I  settled for this image of the windmill.

Overall not a pleasing day for a photo shoot.  I didn’t have anytime to take photos and I really rushed these two photos because of the time constraints.  However I guess even a bad shot is better than not taking any photos.

I just love this time of year watching the colors change, the farmers harvesting their crops and dodging all the deer.  Okay that last part about the deer was a bit of a stretch.

Anyway I was on my way to work this morning and was about 10 minutes earlier than normal and the light was just beautiful.  Soft and orange.  I drove by this lonely combine sitting in a half harvested field and thought that would make a great image (even though I’ve already made one like it last week.)  And no they are not the same combine.   They are both John Deere combines but two different fields 20 miles apart.

So it took me two miles before I made up my mind to go back and take a picture and so I turned around and drove past the perfect turn around, then I had to drive another half mile for the next turn around.

Got the car parked and walked about 400 yards down to where the combine was sitting.  Why did I park so far away?  I don’t know (brain freeze maybe?)  Anyway I took the shot and I like it so there it is for you to enjoy or yawn at. 🙂

This is my friend Bob Hanna.  Bob owns and operates a service business called PRIME Benefits, Inc.  Prime is located in Cedar Rapids and handles a variety of benefit plan designs, section 125 & 105 payment plans etc.

Bob is a great guy and has been a great friend.  We had lunch today at the Irish Democrat.   We discussed politics just about the whole time. 🙂

Here is a church that I go by about every day of the week.  It is at the Otter Creek Junction and sits about 400 yards West of highway 61.  I’ve seen this church and have meant to photograph it for sometime but today was the day.

It was very overcast and looked like it could rain about anytime.  The wind was picking up and because it was such an over cast day I decided to make an HDR image.

So I set up my tripod and attached the cable release to the D300S and shot 5 images at 1 stop intervals per image.  Then I used the 1st, 2nd, and 5th image to give me one at the correct setting and one that was 2 stops under exposed and one that was two stops over exposed.

Then I merged them together using Photomatrix Pro and this is what I came up with.  I kind of like it although it has some issues.  It is still a pretty good image.

Okay a bit of a strange image I’ll admit.  I saw this shot in a photography magazine that subscribe to and I wanted to try it for myself.  This is my 2nd attempt at this shot and it still didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to.

I even had the same lens as the photographer in the magazine.  I used a Tamron Macro lens 90 mm F2.8 1:1.  The photographer used a ring flash as I did and I got the same circle of light he did, but the fibers of the pupil did not look nearly as good as it did in the magazine.

I played with this image in Photoshop and Lightroom until I’m tired of it and this is as good as I my skill level will let me get it.  Maybe I’ll try it again another time with another volunteer. 🙂

A couple of weeks ago Jeanne and I met some good friends at the Star Brewery Restaurant for dinner.  Of course I had my camera along so while we were waiting on our friends we were looking at all the stuff in the lobby.  I didn’t have a tripod (I’m not that bad) with me so I had to bump the ISO up to about 2000 and still I could only get a shutter speed of 1/40.

So there was just a bit of camera shake in this image (so much for image stabilization lenses.)   Anyway the next day as I was culling my images from the past  day I just passed over this one because it was a little too soft for me.

Well I decided today to sharpen the devil out of it and got this sort of surreal looking image, which I kind of like.  So I guess you should never give up on an image until you’ve tried a lot of different things.

I was asked by a friend the other day if I shot anything other than scenery.  Yes I said, but the problem is when you turn your camera on someone they usually either put their hand up or ask you not to take their picture.

I completely  understand this as well.  There are times when I would welcome photos of myself.  When I’m at a good weight and freshly scrubbed 🙂  Other times like maybe now when I’ve put on my Winter weight I’m not so thrilled.

On our trip to Bellevue  last week we stopped at a new restaurant called the “Off Shore.”  Wonderful place to relax and have a great meal.  This young waitress (above) “Anna” who is only 18 was a real delight.  She was so bubbly and friendly.  She engaged us in conversation and gave us great service. We all really liked her.  She told us that she was attending NICC and what her plans were.  Very thoughtful young lady.

Anyway as we were ready to leave I asked her  (I always do) if I could take her image and she just smiled and said “no problem” then gave me this pose.  The image above is just the way came out of the camera (in RAW format) with no retouching of any kind.  The shot below was after some minor touch up and adding a background in Photoshop to make a nice looking person look their best.

So which one do you like?  Which one would you want to frame? Enjoy your weekend.

Every once in a while I do not have a lunch meeting scheduled and then I get to take my camera out on my lunch hour and shoot.  There are a couple of things wrong with this time of day.  One of which is usually the lighting.  It is high noon and that means the harshest light of the day.  Second there isn’t much time available to look for some quality shots.  But hey, it is an opportunity to take images so it’s not all bad.

So today was one of those days when I didn’t have a luncheon engagement and so I grabbed a sub sandwich and headed out-of-town to try to find something interesting to shoot.  I couldn’t find any machinery in the fields and nothing else of interest showed up so as I was coming back into town I noticed this old barn with a couple of horses in the lot.

So I tried to get an interesting shot but as you can see this doesn’t do much in the way of evoking any emotion about the photo.  So I made the image black and white to try to capture something but it is still a lame shot.    Thanks for checking in.

One of the things I enjoy about this time of year is the “Golden Hour” of sunlight, which is perfect for photography and occurs during the time that I am normally driving home.  The light is so soft and warm that it makes something normally just  ordinary  look so good.

This lowly combine was sitting in a field that was almost done.  It is rather a small combine and probably pretty old but I thought it looked interesting sitting in the field with the setting sun light falling on it.

I like this image because to me it says that the end of the harvest time is near and as I watch the fields on my commute I notice many of them have been stripped of their crop and now lay barren under the Autumn sky.

There really wasn’t a good place to stop and take this image but as I looked to the left I saw this distant farm silhouetted against the setting sun and so I just stopped and although still on the road, I grabbed my D700 and shot away.  I like the way it turned out.