Happy Friday.  Since it is officially the season, I thought I would show you some Christmas type images today.  Downtown Maquoketa suffered a devastating a few years ago and the area was finally cleared and is now a green space (that is available for development.)

This year they put up a very nice Christmas tree for everyone to enjoy.  I’ve wanted to photograph it for the last couple of weeks but it has been too cold and or windy (the tree would be moving) to do so.  Last night there was no wind and the temperature was a mild 41 degrees so I got to take some shots.

There was a movie a few years ago (I think 2008) called Vantage Point.  It was not a good movie but it sucked me in and I watched the whole thing.  The movie revolved around one horrific incident and then it would rewind and you would see the same incident from another individual’s point of view.  You couldn’t understand the whole incident until you saw all the different vantage points.

Anyway I called the Jones County Sheriff’s Department yesterday about the incident that occurred on November 15th.  After talking with their investigator I was satisfied with the answers I received and I am happy to report that as far as I’m concerned the incident is closed.  Again it depended on your vantage point as to what the story looked like.

So I set up the tripod in the middle of the green spot and cranked the ISO down to 100.  The native ISO for the D3 is 200 but I figured as long as I was taking timed exposures on a tripod it didn’t matter how slow the shutter speed was.

I shot at f10 so I could get a pretty good depth of field and used the 24 – 120 f4 lens.  I tried several timed exposures and then some 5 shot HDR exposures.  The first two images in this post are HDR images.  The one above is a 3 shot HDR.  It was originally a 5 shot but the two longest exposures had some cars go through so they had a bunch of annoying red, orange, and white lines running through them.

Although you can see (click to enlarge the image) a thin red line going through the shot I really like this image.  I could have spent 40 minutes taking the red line out but maybe it adds something to the image (yes, a red line.) 🙂  Sorry I couldn’t resist.

Finally I wanted to capture a couple of the businesses that were still open.  This is the Great Wall.  A Chinese restaurant that I have lunch at from time to time.  Again I had to make a 3 shot out of this as the two longer exposures were full of lines.  I took one of the Main Street Cafe but all the images had cars in them.

That’s it for today.  Enjoy your Friday.  It is supposed to be a very nice day weather wise.  Thank you for checking out my blog.  I hope you enjoy what you find here.  Be careful.

Imagine we are almost through November and in a few short weeks Christmas will be here assuming the Mayans were wrong.  Anyway our Organization held a nice event last evening at the Ohnward Fine Arts Theater in Maquoketa, Iowa.

I was asked to take images of the even so I showed up a little before guests were scheduled to arrive to shoot some test shots and get the lighting balanced.  If you have never attended a performance at the Fine Art Center you really owe it to yourself to go see this amazing theater.

It was built by volunteer labor, materials and donations.  It was the dream of Gary Drew and he raised a lot of money and got a lot of people engaged to build this remarkable facility.  It rivals any theater in the region for sound, comfort, and aesthetics.  There is also an Art Gallery that is part of the Theater and it is decorated in full Christmas attire.  So last night I shot a few random images to capture the feel of the evening.

There were over 600 people in attendance last night to hear a remarkable speaker, Jim Borel with DuPont agriculture and nutrition businesses.  His presentation focused on how to feed the world in the coming years.  Very interesting.

The more people started coming to the theater the warmer the room got.   I don’t like warm rooms so I would duck in and out of the building.  It was a nice evening so I didn’t mind standing outside greeting people as they came in.

I know this sounds funny coming from an individual whose career is Human Resources but I don’t like being in a crowd of people making small talk.  I’ve always been uncomfortable with that.  Once I’ve said “Hi how are you, glad to see you.” I’m stuck (if it is someone I don’t know or don’t know very well.)

I know all the questions to ask and the rules of engagement, I just don’t enjoy it.  🙂

Anyway it was a nice evening.  I got a lot of nice pictures of the event and left after the presentation about 7:15 pm.

I had the nicest thing happen yesterday.  I went to Rotary (which I’ve been very bad about doing.)  Before the speaker began a fellow Rotarian told the group about my website and my photography.  He was very complementary of my work and it made me feel wonderful.

I’ve known this gentleman for years but not all that well.  So his remarks came as a complete surprise to me.  It was very gracious and kind of him to say the things he did.  Interesting because I had read a blog yesterday from a world-famous photographer who said that the only one you have to please and impress is yourself.

Don’t try to shoot and create for other (unless of course you’re being paid) but shoot to express your vision of the world.  If you please yourself, others will enjoy it as well.

That’s it for today.  Enjoy your day and as a great friend of mine often says.  Find something amazing today, it’s out there.  Be careful because you never know when a guy with a gun is going to walk up behind you and say, “What are you doing?”

Some more images from Monday.   I haven’t shot any images of a train for sometime.  I came across this train sitting just short of an intersection apparently waiting for traffic from the other direction to clear before he could move.

Trains always remind me of my friend Ralph.  He worked for the same company as I did back in the 70s.  His office was in Des Monies.  Occasionally I would go to Des Moines for meetings or to help out as he had a really busy work flow.

Ralph was also an avid photographer and he loved trains.  His office was full of train pictures he had taken over the years.

He also loved to ride motorcycles.  He and some of his buddies traveled all over the US on their bikes and anytime he got the chance he would take a picture of a train.  He had trains from about 40 different states.

His entire office was like an art gallery devoted to railroad trains.  They were all framed, matted, and hung with great care.  It wasn’t sloppy but one was overwhelmed when you first walked into his office.  You could easily spend an hour just looking at all of his train pictures.  He rotated them from time to time so each visit I had some new trains to look at.  He was also a very good photographer to boot.

I remember once that Jeanne and I went to Ames, Iowa where his home was for a Christmas party he threw for the Iowa offices of our company.  There were lots of train pictures but in one room, floor to ceiling was a row of book shelves and they contained every Playboy magazine ever published (at that time.)  Jeanne was not impressed but I was.  🙂

Tragically he was killed in a freak accident in a small Kansas town.  On one of his motorcycle trips he had parked his bike and was walking across the street and a motorist ran into him and he died from the injuries he sustained.

He was such an interesting man and I still think of him some 30 plus years later when ever I see a train.

That’s it for today  Thanks for stopping by and be careful.

Nikon D800 | Nikon 70-200 f2.8 lens | ISO 100 1/320 sec @ f5.6

Back at it today.  I could get use to this life style however.  No tie, wake up when you feel like it and no pressing issues.  🙂  Yesterday afternoon I went down by the river to see what was up.  Found a bunch of Ringed Bill Gulls, Geese, and Ducks.  So I had some fun shooting images of them.

I found this guy sitting on a guard rail.  I didn’t think I could get very close but just kept driving very slowly until I was up close to him.  Then I shot away.  I’ve never seen a gull up close and personal like this.

So I drove around the 16th street basin area.  There isn’t very much water in it. Some of the gulls were just walking around on the water so it is only a couple of inches deep in many places.

Nikon D3S | Sigma 50-500mm f/4.5-6.3 DG OS HSM APO lens | ISO 200 1/400 sec @ f8.0

I found this duck at the river.  He was up along the edge bobbing for food.  I could never catch him with his head completely out of the water so I had to settle for this image.

I sat and watched the river for several minutes.  It was very peaceful and quite.  It was colder than cold but it was peaceful.  I only had a sweatshirt on so I didn’t last long outside the car.  I was surprised at the number of people who were down at the river during the afternoon.

Nikon D800 | Nikon 70-200 f2.8 lens | ISO 100 1/400 sec @ f2.8

I stopped back by the 16th basin on the South side there were a lot of geese milling around.  I tried my stealthy approach and had pretty good success.  I got close enough to this guy that I used the 200 mm lens and still needed to back it down a little.  They seemed totally unconcerned with me.

I had a lot of fun watching the gulls and geese.  There were very few ducks around but I always enjoy watching the water fowl.

I know this image doesn’t fit the theme of the other three but I stuck it in just cause I like it.  I was standing beside the river and finally focused on this house.  It seemed so isolated sitting there all surrounded by trees.

I knew when I shot the image I was going to convert it to black and white.  I have a preset called Antique and I like to use it on a lot of my black and white photos.

Well that’s it for today.  Don’t want to be too late on my first day back.  Hope you enjoy your Tuesday and thanks as always for stopping by.  Let’s be careful.

Nikon D3S | Sigma 50-500mm f/4.5-6.3 DG OS HSM APO lens | ISO 400 1/640 sec @ f8.0

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  We certainly did.  Celebrated our 36th wedding anniversary and had a wonderful evening of dinner and a movie.  Well actually the movie was first at 4:00 pm and then dinner.

Let me rant a little on that.  We went to the 4:00 pm movie thinking it would be  a little discounted (and maybe it was, who knows) but the tickets for two of us was $20.  Okay I guess if you’re looking at 2.5 hours of entertainment $10 per person is not bad.  But then I went to the concession stand.  I got a kiddy bag of popcorn for Jeanne and the smallest (non kiddy) bag of popcorn and a small diet Coke…. $15.75.  I almost said to the kid behind the counter, “you’ve got to be sh***ing me.”  fortunately I didn’t, I just smiled and handed him $20.  😦

Nikon D3 | Sigma 50-500mm f/4.5-6.3 DG OS HSM APO lens | ISO 200 1/450 sec @ f8.0

Okay enough about that.  This is a photography blog.  🙂  So yesterday morning Jeanne and I headed out to look for some eagles that my Friend Dave said were back at the feeding trough.   There is a trapper who dumps his trapping carcases in a field and it attracts lots and lots of eagles.

When we arrived there were between 25 – 30 eagles.  Both juvenile and mature eagles were there along with some brave crows.  I was able to drive up very slowly and get into to position and the eagles were remarkably unconcerned with my presence.  There were a couple that flew away but they soon came back as the buffet was full of food.

To be honest I do not really like shooting eagles this way or at this place.  I was shooting directly into the sun (which was very bright) and we were far enough away that it was difficult to get a sharp focus on the birds.  That plus the fact that I haven’t shot with the 500 mm lens since last March made for some lousy images.

And as a friend of mine says shooting with a junk lens.  However my friend Andreas shoots with a similar lens and he produces excellent images.  He has learned to shoot around the short comings of the lens.  So it was more my technique or lack of it that accounted for the poor image quality.

Nikon D3S | Sigma 50-500mm f/4.5-6.3 DG OS HSM APO lens | ISO 400 1/640 sec @ f8.0

So I shot 687 images of the eagles, 60 survived the first round of cuts and then only 21.  Of that 21 these were the best three. 😦  So as you can see it wasn’t a productive shoot.  Having said that we got to watch eagles fight and scuffle for about an hour and a half so it made it all worth while.

We drove around a 100 miles yesterday looking for interesting things to shoot.  The scenery this time of year is pretty blah.  I took 8 images in that two-hour drive.  Just couldn’t find anything of interest.  Well maybe a couple of images I’ll show tomorrow.  🙂

Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your Monday.  I’m off today (using up the last of my vacation time) so I will get out today and look some more.  You are correct Betty, we all need to be careful.

Yesterday was the most unusual Thanksgiving in my memory.  For almost all of my married life we have traveled on Thanksgiving.  Yesterday we did our normal Saturday routine.  Jeanne was in the kitchen most of the day preparing for today’s Thanksgiving feast and I spent most of the day and evening and late night working on a redesign of the website.  😦

The only time I ventured out of my office was to shoot some images of the Turkey Trot and to take nourishment.  Other than that it was with my face pressed against the computer screen writing code and trying to make things work the way I think they should.

I have 90s skills for a 2012s needs.  Anyway since I didn’t shoot much yesterday I was looking through some of my images and came across this street minstrel from our Galena shoot.  I didn’t like it in color or black and white so I was playing around with one of the plug-ins for Photoshop and came up with this rendition.   Hope you like it.

You can take a look if you want to at about 18 hours of work by clicking here.  I’d enjoy hearing your honest feedback.  Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your Friday and be careful.  By the way, tomorrow the Queen and I celebrate 36 years of marriage.  She is a Saint and I love her so.

Happy Thanksgiving.  Beautiful day for November 22, 2012.  When Jeanne and I first moved to Iowa we lived in Waverly.  I had passed through Iowa but never spent any time in the state.  On November 22, 1977 we got 16 inches of snow and couldn’t even get out of the parking lot until the next day.

That year they had one of the highest snow falls on record.  It was so bad in Waterloo (where I worked) that you could not see at intersections and had to inch your way out.  Lot of people had their front ends hit that year.  🙂

Every year at Thanksgiving Dubuque holds “The Turkey Trot.”  I’m not sure where it starts but it goes down Radford Road, which is only three blocks from where we live.  Ben runs in the Turkey Trot and so I went down to the intersection and shot some images.  135 to be exact and that was culled to 25.

Two years ago Ben ran in the Trot.  Jeanne  and Angie sat down at the corner (in the car) with Joshua (who was only a few days old.)  I was home in bed with a Migraine that lasted about 18 days.  Ugh!

Dubuque has a lot of serious runners.  Each year at the Grandview Gallop they have several hundred participants.  Most of the runners that went by me today were all wearing timing devices and all had regulation jogging gear.  🙂  Makes me tired just watching.

Last year we were in Ames for Thanksgiving so this is the first year I’ve been able to actually go down and watch the run.  I was sitting on the curb getting ground level shots when Ben went by.   I was afraid I would miss seeing him  because I didn’t get down to Radford when they started coming through.  I didn’t miss too many.

I could hear a lot of talking coming from some of the runners and with my hearing that’s saying something.  I saw a group of 4 women carrying on a conversation like they were sitting at a table.  🙂

This lady saw me with my camera and started yelling at me, “Take my picture, take a picture of me.”  As you well know I usually hear just the opposite.  🙂  So I took her picture.

I have no idea who she was but I loved her attitude.  Thanks for stopping by.  I do hope you have wonderful Thanksgiving with your family.  My favorite Holiday as it is not about presents or other things.  Just good fellowship and an attitude of gratitude for all we have.  Be careful.

Happy Wednesday.  Actually this is my Friday.  After today I’m off until next Tuesday.  I told you about Josh’s kitchen in an earlier post and so I wanted to show it here.  He is enjoying making some food for Uncle Mark.

Last night I met with the owners of the Mexican Restaurant I’m building the website for.  There is a slight language barrier and so I wasn’t really sure what they wanted the website to look like.  So I took my best shot and built some test pages to show them.

A friend asked me yesterday how I would know if they liked it or didn’t like it.  I said if they shook their heads and smiled it was okay.  If there was silence there was a problem.  So when the website popped up on my laptop screen the silence was deafening.  🙂

So we communicated some and made drawings and I asked questions and now I go back to the drawing board.  Jeanne said “You must be very disappointed.”  I said, no not really.  I wasn’t thrilled with the design but I had no concept of what they wanted.  Now I do and so I can start to build something based on that new information.

I played around with it last night for a little while before Mr. Sleepy came up and hit me in the head.  So I am excited by the new direction I’m headed and it will be fun to test the waters again in a couple of days.

Coming home last night was a really bad experience.  The fog was as thick as I can remember.  I was only comfortable driving about 35 mph and then I could barely see far enough to feel I could stop if needed.

I got to Dubuque and the street lights made it a little better.  I call a phone call from a friend and as soon as I saw the name on the call I had a sinking feeling.  I had told him he could ride to Dubuque with me after my meeting.

I had forgotten about that as I was thinking more about the changes required in the website and the drive.  I apologized profusely but it was one of those life’s moments that no amount of apology can undo what has happened.

Had it been a normal night there would have been no hesitation to simply turn around and go back to Maquoketa and get him.  But with the drive through the dense fog I had just completed there was no way I was going to risk two more trips in that soup.

Fortunately the need to get to Dubuque was more for convenience than actual need but I still felt terrible about my forgetfulness.   Ugh, just a very bad feeling.

That’s it for today.  More fog this morning but I’d rather drive in daylight fog than night-time.  Enjoy your day.  Thanks for stopping by and be careful.

Short post today.  I didn’t have much time to work on images last night as I am still tweaking the restaurant’s website.  I show the owners of the restaurant the website I have designed for them after work today to see if they like the design.  If they do then I’ll populate the pages and it should launch shortly after Thanksgiving.

I’ve had a lot of fun working on it but I haven’t kept up with the changes in web design and I am sadly behind the technology curve and in some of the newer required skills, so it takes me longer.  For example, iPad or any Apple mobile device does not allow Flash.

Flash is a high quality graphic video and animation solution and most sites have Flash incorporated into their site.  It doesn’t take up a lot of space and it operates very well in an [HTML] (Web) environment.

So I had to find and learn the language that detects if the visitor has an iPad or “i” anything and then redirect them to a non Flash version of the website.  Sounds simple but it took me over an hour and half to get it working properly.  🙂

Anyway I realized about 9:45 pm that I hadn’t taken an image for my 365 project.  Ugh!  What to do?  This Angel was given to me by a dear friend when my Mother passed away many years ago.  She sits high atop my roll top desk and watches over me.  After all these years the battery that powers the light display inside her still worked.  I was surprised.

Anyway that’s all I have this morning.  As always thank you for checking out the blog.  Enjoy your Tuesday and be careful.

I had one of the most enjoyable evenings of recent memory.  We were invited to Angie and Ben’s home to celebrate Joshua’s second birthday.   There was also supposed to be a gender reveal of his soon to be sibling.  Art and Paula Roling (Ben’s parents) were there as was Ben’s younger brother Nick.  Mark and his girl friend Taylor were also there.

As you can see from the image above, Josh made out pretty good.  He was very interested in the presents and it was difficult to keep him preoccupied.  He would keep coming back to the treasure pile.

Finally Josh was allowed to open his presents and he had a wonderful time.  Of course after each present he wanted to play with that particular item.    It was great fun watching him tear into each new package and then be so excited with its contents.

Throughout the evening one of the underlying conversations was, “What do you think it is?”  That however did not detract one bit from all of us enjoying watching Josh enjoy his birthday.

Finally after dinner Angie brought out dessert.  These lovely cupcakes were placed in front of us with strict instructions not to bite into them or open them up in any fashion until we were given the okay.

We were also told that Josh helped his Mother bake these cupcakes.  Some inquiries to him gave us no new information.  He was tight-lipped about the whole thing.   Nick took a poll of everyone and what gender they thought the new baby would be.  It was about 80% that believed it was going to be a girl.

Ben reminded us that the dominate Y chromosome was very strong in is family and that there was a long lineage of males in the Roling family.  He said he wasn’t trying to reveal anything he just wanted those of us who were wanting a girl to be aware.

Finally we were given the okay to cut into our cupcakes and the house erupted in cheers and wahoos!!

It was so much fun and everyone was so excited about the news.  Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together.  🙂  There were high-fives, hugs, hand shakes and even a few kisses to celebrate the grand news.

Even big brother was pretty excited by the news.   Actually I don’t know if he fully realized what was going on at the time but he joined in the celebration.  I was lucky to capture this expression.

Then we were treated to a fashion show of the little ladie’s soon to be wardrobe.  Angie and Ben have been busy shopping for her.  There were several showings of new outfits.  They have been busy shopping.  🙂  I finally quit taking pictures of all the dresses.

I know the Grandma’s were thinking ahead.  There is a lot of shopping to do for this little girl.  Jeanne and Paula were already thinking about what they were going to buy for outfits.  Me, well I was thinking I need a new portrait lens.  🙂

In the end though it was still about Joshua and the celebration of his second birthday.  Grandma Roling gave him this little singing bear that had a cupcake with a candle.  The bear would sing happy birthday and had some pretty cool moves and then in the end it would blow out the candle.

Josh played it over and over about 100 times.  He would start blowing on the candle before the song was over.  So that’s it for today.  A long blog but lots to tell about a very fun evening.  I took over 100 images of the evening so I spared you a lot of shots.

Thank you for stopping by.  Enjoy your Monday.  It’s here all day today.  Be careful.