Upde Designs

Taken with my iPhone

A real treat for me yesterday.  Angie and Josh came to Maquoketa to have lunch with me.  It is always fun to have Angie come down.  She has done this a lot since I’ve been in Maquoketa and we always enjoy the time we have together.

Taken with my iPhone

These shots of Josh were taken with my iPhone, so no critique of the photography please.  He was moving a lot and it was difficult (actually impossible) to get him in focus.

A funny thing that happened.  The image above shows Josh eating a cracker that Angie gave him.  It is a sweet cracker and he loves them.  I was having some soup and he finished his cracker and was eying my saltines cracker.  I gave him a small part of it and he took a bite.

The look on his face was so funny, it was like “Hey this isn’t what I thought it was going to be and YUK!”  He started coughing and Angie just calmly and routinely put her hand under his mouth and out came everything.  She continued talking the entire time.  Never fazed her one bit but suddenly my soup lost some of its desirability. 🙂

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

Some more of the fly in breakfast I attended at the airport this past Sunday.  These T-28s from the WWII era were in mint condition.  There is no other engine that makes that throaty sound like a big radial engine does.  The ground literally shakes as they sit there idling.

Two of the T28s left the airport together.  They took off in tandem and did a couple of fly overs of the airport.  My friend Jim (who used to be a pilot) said that they need a special license to be able to fly in tight formation like that.

On their fly over the airport the trailing T28 turned on the smoke for a nice effect.  I have some more interesting images from the airport shoot but I will see what today brings.  I don’t want you to over dose on airplanes. 🙂

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

I received an e-mail from a dear friend yesterday.  He told me that his Father (75) had sky dived on Sunday 09/11 thus checking off another to-do on his bucket list.  I thought, wow that’s really cool, too bad we weren’t there at the same time and I’m sorry I missed that.

As the above image shows, it turns out that I didn’t miss it.  While I never saw my friend the entire time we were out there, I did capture some images of his Father on his great adventure.  Pretty cool.

I love these types of events.  Especially the vintage planes and specifically the WWII era planes.  There were three versions of the T-28 trainer on display and we had the opportunity to watch two of them start-up and take off (what a wonderful sound those big radial engines make.) This plane was the Navy version of the T-28 and it had the big arrest-er hook on the rear of the plane.

This T-28 is the Marine version.  I’ve seen this plane several times so it must belong to a local aviator.  When this plane taxied off I was standing about 8 feet away and prop wash from that big engine was strong enough to push me back a few steps.

I shot over 255 images.  Not all were keepers but there are some more images I want to post in the next couple of days.  This image is of a beautiful red and gold trimmed biplane.  When he parked the plane I was shooting directly into the sun so the colors and the image are a little washed out  I have some better images of it for tomorrow.

Thank you, as always, for stopping by.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

Happy Monday.  It was a weekend filled with the memories of 09/11/01.  Jeanne and I watched many hours of the stories and remembrances of that terrible day.  Seeing images and hearing stories not shown before brought that day jolting back into my memory.

Saturday after spending what seemed like an inordinate amount of time on yard work I decided to have some fun so I put the Macro lens on the D700 and went out in the back yard to see what I could find.  The above image is a leaf on one of the trees in our back yard.  Obviously someone’s dinner.

I have to admit I do not know what this is.  If I were to guess I would say it must be a cicada.  I’m sure my friend Andreas would know but I just don’t study insects enough to know and fact is I’m too lazy to look it up on the internet.

I was amazed at all the stuff in my back yard.  I’m sure I only saw about 05% of it but when one stops and looks it is just amazing what there is to see.  I shot a lot of images and at some point I’ll share some of them but for right now these three will have to do.

Saturday was a beautiful day and I even enjoyed the yard work (which I usually do not.)  The neighbors across the street were hosting a football party and there was lots of cheering and hollering going on most of the afternoon.  All and all it was a very good day.

Thank you for stopping by the blog.  Enjoy your week.  Tomorrow I’ll post some images from the Fly in breakfast that my friend Jim and I attended yesterday.  Be careful.

What a boring image!  What the heck!  What’s with the blank image?  While I’ll admit this is a boring image of a clear blue sky and a lame excuse for a blog post I will say that one of the main purposes of this blog, is Photography and while this image is nothing to you it is absolutely one of the most beautiful images I have taken.

???????

I’ll explain – Well I had the bane of all Digital SLR shooters, “SENSOR DUST” and it had gotten bad.  I was used to a couple of spots that would be on every image I took and would routinely correct them in Photoshop.  But careful as I am (and I’m almost anal careful when I change lenses on my camera) I still ended up with a fair amount of dust on my sensor.  Enough dust that it was taking me a lot of time to fix each spot.

Two choices – Box the camera up and ship it off to Nikon or attempt to clean the sensor myself.  I took a couple of on-line lessons on sensor cleaning and one on cleaning the D700 in particular.

There are three phases of sensor cleaning and each one is more evasive and correspondingly more dangerous than the last one.  All three require that the sensor be exposed for a period of time, which of course exposes the sensor to even more foreign particles.

Phase I – Involves setting the camera up (in the menu section) to the cleaning mode, which locks the mirror in the up position and then taking an air blower bulb (NOT Canned air as it contains a liquid propellent), turning the camera face down and blowing vigorously into the sensor chamber trying to dislodge any dust particles that have attached themselves to the sensor.  Then with a special viewing prism view the sensor to see if it is clean.  It was not. 😦

Phase II – Involves using a special dry brush (that spins to build up a static electric charge) and then very carefully (not spinning) brushing the sensor to try and pick up any dust particles on the sensor.  Then blowing with the air bulb again.  Check with the viewing prism to see if clean.  It was not. 😦

Phase III – Very worrisome for me now as this phase involves introducing a liquid filled swab (specially made for the process) onto the sensor and wiping the sensor with said swab in a final last ditch effort to clean the sensor.  Check with the viewing prism to see if clean.  Yea!!  It looked clean.  🙂

Testing – Set the camera to manual focus with a very low f-stop and shoot an image of a clear sky (see above.)  Download the image to processing software and inspect for spots.  Again YEA!!  Perfectly clean.

Final test take an image of something that requires detail to make sure the sensor is focusing recording images properly.  See below.  YEA! 🙂  🙂

So I feel much better now because that sensor dust was really bugging me.  Now that I have a nice fresh clean sensor it’s time to go shooting.  thanks for stopping by and be careful.

A quick post today.  I came across this old crane at a construction site the other day and thought it would make an interesting image.  I shot many different angles of the crane but since it was parked up against an old shed it didn’t really lend itself to a full frame shot.

As I was post processing today the problem I encountered was one of artistic impression.  Does this image look better in color or in black and white?  I like things about both images but could not make up my mind.  I welcome your thoughts.

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

Nikon D700 | Nikoon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 200 1/200 sec @ f8.0

Some more images from our trip to Swiss Valley.  Not being as familiar with SV as Jeanne, even I could tell of the massive destruction to the area.  The silt and debris were everywhere.  Lots of uprooted trees.  I hope they are able to rebuild the area for all the children who still haven’t experienced Swiss Valley.

The image above was taken at the Swiss Valley Camp Grounds as were the two below.  Although it sustained substantial damage as well at least part of the park was open.  I would say about half of the park remains closed.

Nikon D700 | Nikoon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 200 1/200 sec @ f8.0

This image is of a foot bridge that runs across the creek.  It will take visitors to the part of the park that is closed to vehicle traffic.  We did not walk over there to look at the damage as we had seen all the destruction we cared to see for one day.

Nikon D700 | Nikoon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 200 1/200 sec @ f8.0

I know what Jeanne will say when she sees this image.  She will say that I “enhanced” the water to get it that blue.  But I promise you I didn’t touch it.  It was a beautiful clear day and the sky was a very pretty blue, which is accurately reflected in this image.

Well that pretty much concludes the images I took at Swiss Valley.  I do not particularly like to take images of storm damage so there was no point in shooting a bunch of uprooted trees, erosion, and silt.

Enjoy your mid-week day.  Thanks for stopping by and be careful.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 200 1/200 sec @ f11

I almost wrote Happy Monday as this is certainly going to seem like Monday all day.  It was a great 3 day weekend.  I didn’t accomplish much over the three days but took a lot of naps.  That is one of my favorite things to do anymore 🙂

Jeanne and I went for a drive Monday afternoon looking for things to photograph.  We didn’t leave the house until about 4:00 pm so the light was starting to get at a nice angle and a good color.

We decided to drive out to Swiss Valley Nature area to look at the damage from the terrible rain storm of a few weeks back.  I’m not very familiar with the area but Jeanne is as she has taken our kids and her school kids there a lot over the years.  I could tell that she was really heart-broken at the sight of all the damage to the Nature area.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 200 1/200 sec @ f11

She said that all the bridges were gone and we walked down to an area that had once been where you could get on one of the foot bridges.  It was just a big canyon now and dirty with all the pulled up trees and debris.  Very sad to look at.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 200 1/200 sec @ f11

Jeanne walked ahead of me back up the trail.  I saw these flowers growing everywhere and even though I didn’t have my macro lens with me I thought I would give the 28-300 lens a go.  I have to say that it did a pretty good job.

It is not designed for this type of photography but I think it did a creditable job of capturing the beauty of the flowers.  Well that’s it for this day.  I have several more images from our visit to Swiss Valley that I’ll share as the week unfolds.

We’re coming up on my favorite time of the year so I should be able to get a lot of clicks in during the coming months.  Don’t forget to consider the Worldwide Photo Walk.  That is coming up soon.

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

I had to include one more shot from Josh’s visit  on Saturday.  He is just so darn cute and I love looking at all the shots I took of him even the “rejects.”

Yes it’s another barn.  I used my lunch hour on Friday to go shooting.  I understand that it is the worst time of the day (light wise) for shooting images but I had the time and the desire to shoot so I went looking.

I’ve seen this barn often , but coming back into Maquoketa  this day, it just looked different to me so I shot a few images of it.  I would have liked to get some different angles but there was no one home and so I didn’t venture onto the property.

I am currently taking an on-line course on Black & White photography and one of the assignments was  to find a color picture that doesn’t work well in its current medium and convert it to black and white to see if it looks more interesting.

This is an image of a county bridge that I shot on Friday and it was pretty forgettable.  I have to admit it does looks more interesting in black and white.

I told Jeanne after finishing the lesson, the more I study photography the less I seem to know.  It is an incredibly complex subject.  There is so much to keep in your head when you press that shutter release.

Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your Labor Day Holiday.  49 degrees when I went out to get the paper this morning.  Finally it looks like there some comfortable weather ahead.  Be careful.

Nice surprise and treat yesterday.  Angie called and said that Ben was on call and at the hospital and she wondered if she and Josh could stop over or a visit.  Well, let me think about that.  Of course!

He is not yet standing on his own but man can he travel.  He had his eyes on lots of things and it was a constant effort to keep him from getting into places that he didn’t belong.

He had a special desire to get to the dogs.  He would get a huge grin on his face and then off he’d go.  Angie would pick him up and put him way back away from the dog but he would giggle and off he’d go again.  It was fun to watch.

It was great to have Angie and Josh over even for a very short visit.  Spent most of the day watching the National Geographic Channel and the remembrance of 9/11.

Enjoy your holiday weekend.  Be careful and thank you for stopping by.