I haven’t posted anything for the past couple of days as life has been kind of hectic of late and I haven’t had the opportunity to do any shooting.  So I thought I would show some more of Christmas Day at Angie and Ben’s home.

Above Mark is overjoyed with the gift from Angie and Ben.  It is a photograph of his sky dive, which he did this Summer.  Both of my kids have now jumped out of perfectly good airplanes apparently trying to beat the plane to the ground.  Fortunately they both waited until they were safely on the ground before telling me of their escapades.

We really had a good time at Angie and Ben’s on Christmas.  It was fun watching Joshua deal with this new experience.  He, at this stage is more interested in the paper and the boxes than what comes in them.

Although he did figure out the shaker and cymbals pretty quickly.  One thing a Grandparent can do is buy noisy toys for their Grandchild and then of course leave.  🙂

Jeanne shows of her new coat that Angie and Ben got her for Christmas.    So it was a wonderful Christmas with lots of nice presents and the sharing of family times.

Today I was visiting with a friend I have known for several years from Rotary.  We got to talking about photography and much to my surprise he is an avid photographer as well.  He likes to shoot landscapes and interesting scenery.

We had an enjoyable time discussing the ins and out of shooting photographs. Very interesting conversation.  Well that’s all I have for today.  I’m going to go looking for Eagles again this weekend.  I’ve got three days of hopefully decent weather to try to capture some nice images.

Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

Wonderful Christmas day.  We were invited to have brunch with Angie, Ben and Joshua.  It was a fun time and I’ll post some of the highlights of our visit tomorrow.  But for today I just couldn’t resist this series of images I took of Joshua.

If you have young children or have had children then you know the miracle of the “Binky.”

Too bad that we can’t have these as adults.  They could make a bad day seem a little more tolerable if you just had a Binky to take away the unhappiness.

I suppose if you think about it we do sort of have a substitute.   Some us try to make a bad day better by eating.  It is still an oral fixation of sorts.  Adult beverages can also take care of a bad day (up to a point. ) Of course they can also do just the opposite and make an okay day a bad day.  Certainly the next day a bad day.

But with the Binky securely ensconced in Josh’s mouth all is right with the world.  Oh if all of life’s trials and tribulations were so easily solved. 🙂

Enjoy your day.  Hopefully you have the day off today so if you do be careful.  If you don’t then make the best of your busy day.

Mark, Jeanne, Tim, Pam, Jay, Jackson, Denny, Mike, Mary, and me

Merry Christmas to you all.  Yesterday we left early and drove to Cedar Falls to pick up Mark.  Then on to Ames to have coffee and sweet rolls with Jeanne’s Mother Jay before all of us loaded up and headed for Des Moines to spend Christmas Eve Day with Jeanne’s sister Mary and her family.

We were joined there by her cousin Pam and her family and we enjoyed a non-traditional Christmas dinner of pasta, meatballs, and salad.  It was wonderful and we may have just started a new tradition.

After a abbreviated game of Hearts we left Des Moines around 5:30 pm and back to Ames where we watched Jay open some of her gifts.  Then back to Dubuque arriving about 9:30 pm.  Jeanne and Mark went to 10:45 service at church.  Heathen that I am I laid down and the next thing I remember is waking up at 1:30 am this morning.  🙂

Today we celebrate Christmas with Angie, Ben and Joshua so we get to double up on our Christmas Joy.  I hope you have a wonderful, safe, and peaceful Merry Christmas.  Be careful.

If you do not have your Christmas shopping completed yet then you are rapidly running out of time. 🙂

May the blessings of this wonderful day be with you and your family.

Time to finish up my Galena Shoot.  Even though I could post another entire week of images from that shoot it is time to move on, after today that is. 🙂

I told you there were at least two choirs in Galena during the day.  There may have been even more but I only saw the Madrigal Singers and this choir.  I’m not sure what group they belong to but their songs were beautiful.

On many of the street lamps in Galena they have hung over sized tree ornaments.  I thought these made a nice Christmas image.  Other than the dripping water and the slippery sidewalks the morning at Galena was very enjoyable.  The temperatures were mild and the air brisk.  Just the way it should be while Christmas shopping, I think.

I have no idea why I captured this image other than it must have been the reflection of the town surrounded by the Christmas greenery and the Coors Light neon sign that attracted me.  It is kind of an interesting image the more I look at it.

That’s it for the Galena shoot.  I shot a bunch of store signs and I may post them one of these days when I’m desperate for something to post. 🙂  It’s been another busy week with no time to slip out and capture any images.

Other than my Bank Board Of Directors shoot on Tuesday I haven’t touched a camera all week.  I don’t like that.  I hope you and your family have a joyous and peaceful Christmas.  May all the blessings of the Season be with you.

Thank you for stopping by.  Enjoy this glorious holiday and be careful.

Thankfully the days should slowly start getting longer now that we have crossed the Winter Solstice.  A short post today with some Photoshop use.  The image above is one I took in a store in Galena.

I shot this image with an HDR effect in mind but since I didn’t have a tripod with me and the light was low enough that I had to shoot at a relatively slow shutter speed I opted to just take the image and capture the scene and fix it later in Photoshop.

To be perfectly candid with you I didn’t notice the guy behind the shelving looking at products when I took the image.  I got ready to process the image and was really disappointed to see that he was there.

I didn’t want to give up on the image because I still had this vision in my mind of what I wanted the photo to look like.  So a little pseudo HDR filtering, some masking, and cloning in Photoshop and I have the image I saw in my mind.

Of course now that you’ve seen the original it isn’t all that convincing but if I hadn’t shown you the original image and just posted it as an HDR image you might not have seen the adjustments.  Anyway I spent about 15 minutes on this image and I’m happy with it.

Enjoy your day.  Thanks for taking a look and be careful.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 70 - 200 mm f2.8 | Strobes | ISO 200 1/125 sec @ f6.7

I start this post with an image of my friend Kara.   Yesterday, I had the opportunity to take the Board Of Director images at one of our banks.  It was a thrill and honor to get to do that.  Kara was kind enough to be my test subject while I calibrated the strobes.

This is one of my favorite signs from the Galena shoot.  I think it speaks for itself so no other comment needed.

What made yesterday’s shoot special for me was the fact that for the longest time I have wanted to do some serious portrait work.  Once these images are processed and printed they will hang in the boardroom for many years.  🙂

The other thing that was special was all that practice I had done before the shoot really paid off.  I had the lights set up perfectly so I didn’t get any glare off of people’s glasses.  I only had to set the f-stop once and didn’t have to keep adjusting it.  Things just came together to the point that post processing will be about 5 minutes per image tops.

So all the times I taken on-line lessons on photography, the constant theme has been practice, practice, practice.  I think they are on to something.  🙂  Anyway it was great fun and I feel like I learned a few more things for the next opportunity.

Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

Today I will show more of the Galena shoot from Saturday.  I will open with this touristy type shot to show you the weather conditions.   It was not a good shooting day and I decided early on that I would just try to capture some little snippets of Galena and not worry about shooting some of the more notable architecture of the town.

You can see that the sidewalks are still wet and slick from the snow earlier that morning and as well you can see all the awnings that were constantly dripping water.   The dripping water was an inconvenient nuisance for the shoppers but it was a real bane for a photographer.

I would assume most of you who read this blog have shopped in Galena.  It is an enjoyable place to meander from shop to shop.  You can find anything from the “Why would anyone want that,” to the “I can’t live with out that.”   There are usually a lot of folks from the larger cities that shop there and being a people watcher by hobby I enjoy just making observations.

After a couple of hours of walking around and looking at this and that Steve and I decided to duck into a coffee shop and have a sit down.  My feet hurt as did my back so the chair felt extra good.  The hot coffee and peanut butter cookies didn’t hurt either.

The image above was shot from the outside through a window capturing the necklaces inside. Doesn’t make for a good shooting condition but I liked the way the light was bouncing off the jewels.

Finally for this post an image of some of the Madrigal Singers.  There were actually two youth singing groups at Galena while we were there.  I have pictures of them as well but I liked the costumes of these young folks.  Not to mention they sang beautifully.

All the images on this post were shot with a Nikon D3 DSLR | Nikon 28 – 300 VRII lens | ISO 200 1/250 sec @ f8.0

Enjoy your day and thanks for stopping by.  be careful.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 200 1/500 sec @ f8.0

I will depart from my Galena shoot to show you way more Canadian Geese than you want to see.  After church I decided to take my camera out exploring and happened by the area where the old Dubuque Packing Company use to be.

I saw a bunch of large square stones that were sitting in three long rows with about 30 – 40 stones in each row.  It looks like at some point they will be used for either some building or landscaping.  The way they lined up made me think they would make a nice black and white image.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 200 1/500 sec @ f8.0

When I found a place to park and got out of the car I head a lot of geese honking.  I looked over at a small hill and saw that there was some where in the neighborhood of about 200 Geese just sitting on the hill overlooking some frozen water.  It had been a long time since I had seen that many geese in one spot.

I was just getting ready to take some images when this large gaggle of geese flew over me and looked like they were going to land on the pond but they didn’t and instead they flew in a big sweeping circle and came back over me again.  I was a little worried about getting bombarded 🙂 but nothing happened.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 200 1/500 sec @ f8.0

They circled over me four times before finally landing on the ice.  It was funny to see them float gracefully down to the surface only to slip and slide on the ice trying to stop.  Some of the geese ran into geese that were already there and that made for some interesting conversations.

It was just cool to see that many geese in one area and to watch them fly over several times before finally landing.

Nikon D3 | Tamron 200 - 500 mm lens | ISO 200 1/180 sec @ f8.0

I went over to the park located by Catfish Charlies and took some shots of gulls and ducks with my long lens.  Trying to get in practice for Eagles.

Well that’s it for today.  Sorry about all the geese but when you shoot 200 images of geese you have to do something with them.  🙂

Enjoy your Monday.  Thanks for stopping by and be careful.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 800 1/125 sec @ f8.0

The forecast was for mid to high 30s, sunshine and no precipitation.  What we got instead was low 30s (barely), cloudy, overcast and snow.  But being the intrepid adventurers that we are we went forward with our plans to visit Galena yesterday.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 800 1/15 sec @ f8.0

We met our dear friends Steve and Becki at the Welcome Center and after a brief greeting we took off for Main Street to do some shooting and shopping.  Well I mainly shot, Becki and Jeanne did the shopping and Steve kept me company.

I am not, nor never have been a shopper.  But if you are Galena is full of great architecture and quaint shops.  It is in fact a shoppers’ paradise.

There had been just enough snow yesterday to made every awning (and almost every store has one) turn into a small rain shower.  Keeping the camera dry proved to be a challenge.

Additionally the sidewalks (a lot them are made with bricks) were very slippery and so you either had to walk like a turtle or risk falling on your pride.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 800 1/100 sec @ f8.0

I opted to not take a flash with me so I missed a lot of great photo opportunities inside the shops because the light was just too dim to make an image.  I did get some as shown by these images.  But I missed some great opportunities as well.

That’s it for today.  Much more to show you.  I managed to snap 117 images in 4 hours of walking and sitting.  Most are not worthy of the light of day but some will make the cut and will be published.

My friend Andreas has a collection of signs that he has taken over the years.  I shot a couple dozen signs yesterday.  There are some really neat ones to see and I’ll show you some of the best.  Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your Sunday and be careful.