Upde Designs

Today, July 21st is the 43rd anniversary of when men first walked on the surface of the moon.  Quite a remarkable feat indeed when you stop and think about the sheer enormity of such an undertaking, then think they did it with the technology (more the lack of it) back in 1963 – 69.

This time of year there are a lot of WWII vintage “War Birds” that congregate at the Dubuque Airport to practice formation flying before going on to Oshkosh for the big airshow they have.

Last night on the way home I notice a four ship formation of them flying around the airport so I stopped by the observation area to capture a few images.  The sun was at an angle that made trying to shoot them in the air almost impossible.

By the time I got parked, got my camera out of the bag, dialed in what I thought would be the right settings for the shooting conditions, they were in the top formation ready to land.  So I had to settle for some shots at they came back to the hangers, on the taxi way.

The last couple of years when they’ve been practicing and especially if you happen to be there when they take off they will form up and do a nice fly by for photographers.   There were a few photographers there last night when I arrived but they were getting ready to leave and I quickly understood that the show was over.

None the less I was happy to capture these images.  I’ll take any opportunity presented to shoot these vintage airplanes.  Doesn’t really matter to me if they are in the air or on the ground.  I just love the looks and sounds of these mighty birds.

Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your day.  I on the other hand have the wonderful good fortune to be able to attend a wedding today and then a reception where 523 people are going to be.  Yippee!!  That many people in a relatively small room will, I’m sure produce an interesting evening.  😦

Be careful.

Happy Friday.  Above is an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image I took in 2010.  It was one of the very first HDR images I tried.  At the time I thought it was pretty good but now it looks not so good to me.

I’ve learned a lot since I made this image.  Candidly the software has made some improvements as well.  I shot this HDR with the Nikon D700 full frame sensor.  I processed the images using Photomatrix software, which was pretty much an industry standard for making a composite and tone mapping multiple images into an HDR image.

Yesterday on the way home, looking for something for my 365 project I decided to re-shoot the church at Otter Creek.   One, because there were a lot of neat clouds in the sky.  The temperature was down to a cool 74 degrees and the steeple had a new paint job. 🙂

A little aside for a moment.  Yesterday as part of my duties of being the Chamber President I got to tour a company that works with plastics.  It is a family owned business run by some of the most gracious, friendly, and enjoyable people I have had the good fortune to meet.  They were celebrating their 20 years in business and giving tours of the production facility.

When I arrived at the plant (in a suit of course) my vehicle thermometer was registering 91 degrees.  So I quickly ditched the coat and went inside.  I took a one hour tour of a facility where the temperature was at least 110 (they use high energy ovens to heat the plastic.)  Let’s just say I was hot and perspired a tad.  🙂 Actually I thought I might just croak.  I’ve been hot before but I can’t ever remember being hotter than I was yesterday.

Okay back to the photography.  Here is the Otter Creek Church as I shot it last night complete with newly painted steeple.  The clouds were magnificent and menacing but nothing came of it.  Unfortunately no rain.

So after about 20 -30 minutes getting all set up and testing for different exposure values I shot five different groups of 5 images for the HDR processing.  If you check out my 365 project you’ll see what I used for my picture of the day. 🙂

Thanks for stopping by.  Back into the broiler this weekend.  I have a wedding to go to tomorrow. Ugh!  Well all weekends are great.  Some are just better than others.  🙂

Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your day and the weekend.  Be careful.

I was as usual running close to being late yesterday.  It was shaping up to be another HOT day and I was zooming along the back roads on my way to highway 61 with the air conditioning running at full speed.

Tuesday I had been in Monticello and when I went by the airport there were 5 crop dusting planes sitting on the tarmac with their engines running loading chemicals to spray.  I took a picture of one of them for my 365 project.

Then yesterday, a couple of miles ahead of me I saw a plane pulling up over the horizon, making a sharp turn and diving back down below my vision.   I tried to figure out what his next few paths would be and I found a place to pull off the side of the road and got my camera set up.

I missed the first pass he did because my lens and view finder were all fogged up.  I got a few shots but they were foggy and you couldn’t tell what the picture was of.

I guessed pretty good because by the time he did his second pass I had the lens cleaned off and he flew over me just to my right.  I thought for a moment he was going to hit those grain bins but it was an optical illusion apparently. 🙂

Then I lost sight of him again and the next time I saw him he was on my left side.  There were enough trees, buildings and corn that kept me from following his flight path.  So I really couldn’t anticipate where he would pop up.

I had the D3S set on burst mode and it has a huge buffer capacity so I just let it rip when I heard his engine and then tried to find him in my view finder.

This is my favorite image of the bunch.  No I didn’t add the clouds or the blue sky.  That is the way it looked in the view finder.  Jeanne asked me the same question.  Apparently she’s seen enough of my Photoshop work to question a nice picture I try to show. 🙂

No tricks on any of these.  Just a little sharpening and color balancing.  I was dripping wet by the time I got back in my car and got the AC going again.  Yes I was late for work as is my custom of late.  😦

Thanks for stopping by.  Another hot one in store for us today.  Hopefully there will be a break in the near future.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

I carry a camera with me on most of my travels around our footprint as I visit the different banks.  Occasionally I’ll happen by something of interest and take time to capture an image or two.

Such is the case the other day when I happened by this old tractor sitting abandoned in a field.  I turned around and went back to take a closer look.  I saw that it was in fact not abandoned but had a for sale sign attached to it.

It is around a 1923 – 1930 vintage tractor.  I tried to narrow that a bit but lack of time inhibited my research.  I do have a little history on the company.

McCormick-Deering was never a “company” itself, but the trademark name of a line of tractors and farm machinery manufactured by the International Harvester Co.

Between the mid-1880s and 1902, a vicious battle known as “the Harvester Wars” was waged on America’s grain fields. The farm equipment manufacturer’s capacity to build harvesting machines far exceeded demand, so sales representatives of the two giants, McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. and Deering Harvester Co., along with their smaller rivals, tried every trick possible to sell their binders to reluctant farmers. The struggle became so intense that competing salesmen would not only bribe farmers to buy, but also allegedly sabotaged the competition’s machines and physically attacked people.

As the war dragged on, binder prices fell drastically and selling expenses grew to more than 40 percent of total sales. Something had to be done and, in 1902, a merger among the five largest companies was brokered by the J.P. Morgan banking firm. The McCormick, Deering and Milwaukee Harvester companies, Piano Mfg. Co., and Warder, Bushnell & Glessner (Champion harvesters) merged to become the mighty International Harvester Co.

So that’s it for today.  Hope you enjoyed the images of this wonderful old tractor.  If you get bored and need to kill a couple of minutes take a look at my 365 project.  It’s only 17 days old but is a lot of fun.

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

Happy Tuesday.  Sunday Angie, Ben, and Joshua came over for dinner.  Mark was also home for the weekend but he and his lady friend took advantage of the Olive Garden’s bread sticks and salad special, so they just watched us eat. 🙂

One of Josh’s favorite things to do (and Grandma’s place is the only place he gets to do it) is turn lights off and on with the wall switch.  He will flip the switch and then point to the light and say “lights.”

Josh loves yogurt and he has it with most of his meals.  If he could he would eat the container it comes in.  When he is through with the cup it bears little resemblance to its former state.

At first he will use his spoon to get the delicacy out but at some point the spoon becomes useless and the hands have to take over.  Fun to watch him tackle it.

After dinner he went back to his new favorite game.  Playing with the refrigerator magnets.   He lines them all up in a precise fashion and then methodically takes them off one at a time and places them on the floor.  Then he repeats the process over and over and over.  🙂

He’s showing Dad how to do it correctly.  It was a fun evening and we always enjoy having the kids over for a visit.

Hope you enjoy your Tuesday.  Stay cool and as always thank you for reading the blog.   I’ve been shooting a lot lately thanks to my new project so I have a fair amount of inventory built up.  🙂  Be careful.

Nikon D800 | Nikon 24 – 70 f2.8 lens | ISO 100 11/160 sec @ f8.0

Before you get concerned about my mental state and say WTF are you doing showing us clothes pins, let explain and then you can certainly question my current state of mind. 🙂

I blame it on my new 365 project.  I am now keenly aware that I need to shoot things that I might otherwise pass over.  So yesterday morning I was in the back yard photographing another object / entity (more for a later post) when I noticed these three clothes pins on the clothes line.  Jeanne often hangs things out on the line to air dry.  Actually if you click on the image it will show a larger image and you can see some great detail.

Nikon D800 | Nikon 105 macro f2.8 lens | ISO 100 1/60 sec @ f14

I thought they looked kind of neat so later in the day I put the 105 mm macro lens on and went back out to see if I could get even more detail.  The first thing I noticed was that it was hotter than the hubs of hell so I didn’t stay very long and set up my shots.

The second thing I noticed was there was a natural (well Jeanne did it by accident) grouping of clothes pins.  Either in groups of three, groups of two or single pins.  I also was interested by how weathered these pins are.  I don’t know how long they’ve been on the line but it looks like a very long time.

Nikon D800 | Nikon 105 macro f2.8 lens | ISO 100 1/160 sec @ f7.1

I can also hear my friend Dana saying, “Why didn’t you make these in black and white?”  I did think about that for awhile and certainly the texture of the wood and the line would do well in B&W but I also liked the green and gold (color of my burnt out yard) as a background so I opted to leave them in color.

Check back tomorrow please and I’ll do my best to have something a little more interesting to show you.  Enjoy the beginning of the work week.  Forecast looks to be another HOT one.  Be careful.

So far my 365 project is doing exactly what I wanted it to do.  The project is forcing me to look at my photography in much a different way.  I’m seeing more things that are of interest to me from a photographic view-point.

I can also see, however, that as time passes it is going to become a huge challenge.  I have read many blogs from people who started such a project and then never finished it because it is so hard to capture an image everyday, when that is not your main job.

On the way home last night I took Skyline Road behind the airport and I noticed a helicopter bobbing up and down in the corn field.  He was spraying the corn crop that is adjacent to the airport.

I found a place to park and waded a few paces into the corn field to capture these images.   What I won’t do for the viewers of this blog.  🙂

Enjoy your Saturday and the rest of the weekend.  Thanks for stopping by and be careful.

Happy Friday The 13th.  Click on the above image and it will give you a 1200 pixel wide panorama of the duck pond as it looked yesterday.  For the most part all the water is gone.  There is a small layer of water on the far West side of the pond but even that is less than 2 or 3 inches deep.  It is very sad.

The Geese in this image and the one below are the new families that gave birth this Spring.  The young ones are not quite ready to fly for any distance so they continue to stay at the pond.

The marsh across the highway is also bone dry and there are a couple of geese families there as well.   I traveled to Monticello, Iowa today on highway 64.  There is a marsh over by Baldwin, Iowa and it is mostly dried up as well.  Everything is so dry and brown.

I was talking with someone today who said that this will be worse than the bad drought of the 80s.  I know that just from looking at the corn on the way to and from work that it is going to be a bad crop this year.

So we will persevere and next year there may be too much water.  There are cycles and this is just another one.   That’s all I have for today.  Hope you enjoy your Friday and the up coming weekend.

Thanks for stopping by.  Be careful.

As a child did you ever lay on your back in the grass, look up at the sky and clouds, and imagine different clouds looked like different things?  Some of us still do that even though we are no longer a child.  Well at least chronologically.

The first image is actually about 5 minutes after I shot the one below.  I just went outside to see what the weather was like.  It was a wonderful evening with pleasant temperatures.  I looked up in the sky and saw the image below and knew instantly what it was.

Maybe it’s because I’ve wanted lobster for the last few weeks, but it looked to me exactly like a big old lobster making its way across the sky.  Five minutes after I shot this image I looked up and the lobster was gone and a blob was in its place.

Maybe you see something completely different.  I could almost taste the dripping butter.  Okay maybe that’s a bit much.

I had just finished watching a photography lesson featuring the wonderful Jay Maisel (a New York based photographer of some fame.)  He was talking about his philosophy of photography and one of the things he said was he always does a 3 shot bracket of everything he shoots.

So he shoots one shot as metered by the camera and then one shot over exposed from that metering and one shot under.  Your bound to get the right exposure plus you can composite the three images into an HDR image.

The shot above is of my neighbor’s back yard.  They do such a fabulous job of taking care of their back yard I can let mine go to seed and still look out the back door and see something truly beautiful.  🙂

That’s it for today.  Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your day and just ever once in a while look up and see what you can see. 🙂  Be careful.