Upde Designs

Nikon D700 | Nikon 28 - 300 VII Lens | ISO 200 1/125 @ f5.6

I have a very short post for you today for two reasons.  One I got bogged down with wimpieness (is that even a word) and two I spent all day Saturday (well most of the day) working on the yard.  So as a result I didn’t take any images over the weekend and I had to go through my left overs for a post today.

I do like the image above.  I was taking a group picture of the FAS Team last week  (I built their web site)  as it needed updating.   While waiting for all the people to come into the room I was taking some test shots checking white balance and exposure and shot this image of my friend Steve Kent.  I really like how it came out. Because it was just a test image I didn’t give it a good look the first time.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 28 - 300 VII Lens | ISO 200 1/125 @ f11

The other day I saw this Robin on the clothes line and it stayed there for quite some time.  I grabbed my camera and took a few images.  I like this pose.

That’s it for today.    I hope you have a great week and stay cool.  Thanks for stopping by.  Be careful.

Nikon D700 | Tamron 200 - 500 mm lens | ISO 200 1/250 @f10

Yesterday I had no meetings or lunch engagements over the noon hour so I grabbed a Mickey D burger and headed for the “Duck Pond.”  The babies that I showed you a few weeks ago have grown up.  I thought you might enjoy seeing their progress.

I can make all kinds of excuses for these images but I won’t.  I’m not happy with any of them but as the popular saying goes they are what they are so here they are.  Yes most of these geese are the little babies I showed you just a few short weeks ago.

Nikon D700 | Tamron 200 - 500 mm lens | ISO 200 1/250 @f10

I took the Nikon D700 with me because of its full frame sensor (the lighting wasn’t the best) and because of its very fast burst rate (since you never know what you might find at the pond.)  I also took the Tamron 200-500 lens since the wildlife generally do not like to get too close.

I shot 280 images in 35 minutes.  Yes I was a little shutter happy.  On the first review I culled that number down to 179 and on the second pass it dwindled to 55.  Of the 55 only 21 were of wildlife, the other 34 were for a panorama of the “Duck Pond.”

I haven’t processed those yet but I didn’t do a very good job.  It was starting to sprinkle as I was doing it so I hurried a bit and as a result they are not very good I’m afraid.  We’ll see. 😦

Nikon D700 | Tamron 200 - 500 mm lens | ISO 200 1/250 @f10

This image is about the little bird that is intruding on the Swan’s feeding space and the male came out of the tall grass and inched ever closer to the little bird until it finally got the message and flew off.  Unfortunately I didn’t get that shot.

So this is all I have for you today.  Not very inspiring but I did try.  Hope you enjoy your Friday.  Thanks for stopping by.  Be careful.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 70 - 200 mm f2.8 | ISO 200 1/1250 @2,8

Good Day.  A short post today as I did not have time to shoot yesterday.  Well actually that’s a bit of a stretch.  I did have time and I even took a different route home last night but I couldn’t find anything that caught my eye.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 70 - 200 mm F2.8 | ISO 200 1/800 @ f2.8

So I went back over my flower shoot last Friday at Hurstville and picked some images that didn’t exactly make the first cut.  I’m not sure why as I like both of these images a lot so I must have looked at them differently today.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 70 - 200 mm F2.8 | ISO 200 1/800 @ f2.8

This is not one of my favorite images.  I didn’t get the light right on this image and it was a lousy composition.  To tell the truth it was like an oven  the day I shot this and I was a bit of a hurry to get back into the AC of the car.  This was my last image of the shoot so I was probably cooking.  Shame on me.

Anyway hope to have something interesting for you tomorrow.  Thanks for stopping by.  Be careful.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 200 1/400 sec @f11

Thank you for stopping by.  I have another Hodgepodge group of images for you today.  I was coming home Monday evening and off to the west was this interesting cloud formation.   It went from beautiful to ugly in a very short time but when I pulled off the road to shoot this image is was beautiful.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 200 1/160 sec @f11

Further down the road on the Skyline County Road I see this lone tree every day and have often thought about shooting it because of the way it looks so out of place in the middle of a cornfield.   Usually the sun is behind it so it wouldn’t make a good picture.

This evening you could clearly see where there was rain and where there was not.  With the cloud cover I could get an image of the lonely tree

Nikon D700 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | ISO 200 1/80 sec @f11

As I was getting back in my car I looked down in the ditch and amongst the weeds, plastic bottles and trash was this lone wildflower.  It made an interesting contrast to the junk that surrounded it.  I took several images to show the junk and a couple of close-ups and decided on to let the flower stand on its own.

Of the three images I really like the storm clouds (first image.)  I shot about 20 images of the cloud but they all pretty much look like this one.  Hope you have a wonderful day.  Be careful.

A quick post today as I am running very late.  Angie, Ben and Joshua stopped over on the 4^th of July for dinner.  It was good to see them again.  Joshua continues to discover new things and abilities every day.

It won’t be long until he is fully mobile and then his parent’s life is going to change dramatically.  I remember when Angie started cruising it was a whole different ball game then.

Angie sat Joshua down in the grass.  He does not care for grass right now as you can tell from his facial expression.  I told him it was okay because his Mother was the same way when she was that age.

Sorry for the short post but I’ve got to run.  Thanks for stopping by.   Be careful.

I wasn’t sure how long this was going to take.  I put in a long day Saturday and most of Sunday rebuilding files.  The ironic thing is I’m usually anal about backing up things but for the last few weeks (8 to be exact) I hadn’t done any backing up.  Those files are gone forever.  Some of them were images.  Our last day at the lake is gone.  Only the small 500 pixel images that I posted on the blog are all that remain.

Learn from my mistake.  If it is worth having it is worth backing up.   There is some good news to this accident.  It solved a problem with the way my computer was configured and now that the disk was clean of files I could reconfigure it properly.  Things are also better organized and I put in new procedures to make sure my hard drives get backed up every week.  The silver lining to this event was the database that I have built since 1984 was safely installed on a different drive.  I didn’t discover that until Friday morning and that was such a relief.

On the way home from work Friday evening I drove by the Hurstville Kilns, which I do practically every evening.  This evening I saw the flowers were in full bloom and looking vibrant.  This was the first time I had really noticed their color this year.  So I did a U turn and went back.

I love the colors and even though the light was still pretty harsh I was happy with the way they turned out.  I knew that I wasn’t going to get any shooting in over the weekend so I’m glad I stopped.

It is good to be blogging again and I am grateful that you stopped by for a look.  I am so connected with my laptop and the files on it that it was very unsettling to be without it.  No access to e-mail, the internet or for that matter my digital darkroom.

Anyway I’m happy to have things somewhat back to normal.  Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your week and be careful.

Good Day.  This Blog will be off-line for a few days while I rebuild my hard drive, which crashed two days ago.  Please check back soon as I hope to have it up and running by the weekend.

Thanks for stopping by and be careful.

This is a close up of the GPS that is in the boat.  You can see that it gives you a lot of information including the depth of the water below the boat, the water temperature and how fast you are going.  Additionally it gives you depth readings some distance in all directions from your location.  Keep this in mind as you continue to read.

After the kids put away their Jet Ski and we took a little break we decided to go back out to Pelican Island and see if we could pick up a couple more Walleye to go with the one Angie caught in the morning.

So about 6:30 pm we headed out.  The lake was just beautiful and calm.  I wasn’t optimistic about our chances of catching anything but wanted as much time on the lake as possible since this was our last opportunity.

This is the stony point where we had caught the Walleye on Thursday and we made several passes at it with not so much as a nibble.  Everyone was growing tired of the inactivity so we decided to head in, have a late dinner and start packing for our departure.

The sky was just wonderful and the lake was so calm and beautiful.  We were trolling South on the West side of Pelican and I wanted to go to the Southern most part of the island where Gull Island is and take some pictures of the hundreds of Pelicans that reside there.

We were running at about half throttle with 8.9 feet of water under the boat and a quick glance at the lake and GPS assured me things were fine.  I looked down to retrieve my camera from it water proof container and was inspecting the setting when there was a loud noise and a jolt to the boat.  The motor stopped immediately and I had a sick feeling in my stomach.

I looked first at the GPS and it said 3.2 feet of water under the boat.  I looked over the side and saw the huge boulder rocks that surround Pelican.  I had drifted slightly off course and hit a rock with the motor.

I won’t go into all the details of having to have the dock boy come out and put a new prop on the motor so we could limp in.  It was totally my fault and yes I can say that the area was not well marked but the fact is I was driving the boat and I diverted my attention elsewhere in a dangerous place and as a result of that we hit a rock.

Although it didn’t ruin the vacation it did make me feel really bad.  Later we had a wonderful dinner.  I went up to the lodge and apologized to the owner and gave him my insurance information.  He was very gracious said it wasn’t the first time.

Anyway, it was a wonderful vacation and I would go back in a heartbeat.  Many wonderful memories created this time and many past memories revisited.

One of my favorite images of the entire trip.  Thanks for stopping by.  Be careful.

After dragging their Jet Ski all the way from Dubuque the kids were determined to put it in the water at least for a few minutes.  I had never saw them on the Ski before so I got the idea of taking the boat out and having them go past me while I took some images.

Ben said they didn’t have any pictures of themselves on the Jet Ski other than at the loading ramp.  I can certainly see why they enjoy it so much.  It has a top speed of over 65 mph and can turn on a dime.  It has instant acceleration and is very maneuverable so it makes for a fun machine on the water.

Of course Angie is only happy to ride passenger for a little while and then she wants to drive.  She did some spectacular turns that must have created some real g-force on them.

While we were cruising up and down the shore I spotted this sail boat and thought it might make a nice image.  It isn’t exactly what I thought it would be but close enough.

We went back to the dock so Mark could get a ride on the Jet Ski.  Angie gave him a an exciting ride about half way to Pelican Island with lots of turns thrown in for good measure.

I couldn’t get to the shore’s edge fast enough to get a clear image of them, so this will have to do.  It will give you an idea of the speed of this machine.

Through it all the young master seemed unimpressed.  He is so restricted in his life jacket that about the only thing he can do is just take a nap.  It is pretty evident he does not like the straight, I mean life jacket.

Thanks for stopping by, hope you had a great Fourth Holiday.  Tomorrow I wrap up the vacation post with the events and images of Friday evening on the lake.   Be careful.

Good day and happy Fourth of July to you.  We are now at Friday and essentially the last day of our vacation, at least for Leech Lake as we have to check out by 9:00 am on Saturday.  I have a lot of images to share with you today but I’m going to break Friday up into 3 separate posts.  Because it was so packed with events that helped define the vacation and there are just too many images and events that happened on Friday to try and do it in one post.

The first image and the image above is what greeted me when I arose on Friday morning to a beautiful sunrise and mild temperatures.  The lake was almost placid and the gulls were busy hunting for food.  This day had all the makings of a wonderful fishing day.

Our plan was to fill the thermos with coffee and pack a lunch and head for Boy Bay for a wonderful day of fishing.  We told Jeanne we might not be back until dusk if the fishing was good.  So we had a hearty breakfast, packed the gear and headed out for Boy Bay.

As we left the protected harbor of the resort this is the way the lake looked.  I knew three things.  The trip over to Boy Bay would be fast because of the lack of waves, that the bugs would be a problem from the lack of wind, and the fishing would be less than stellar as the lake was going to be too calm.

We arrived at Boy Bay and started fishing at the entrance of the bay.  We had just rounded the corner when Angie caught a 25 inch Walleye and I thought to myself, okay “Fishmaster” you don’t know what you’re talking about.  The fish are going to bite today.

This image is for Andreas.  It is the only decent shot of a Pelican I got for the whole week.  It was very frustrating.  I didn’t have my long lens in the boat, only my 200 mm lens and the boat was not a stationary platform even on this calm day, it would move a lot.

There were 4 times during the last two days where awesome formations of Pelicans flew low and directly over the boat and I was unprepared for any of them.  I got a lot of blurry ends of white fuzzy things but nothing else.

At one point I got a Pelican in flight skimming the water with its wings almost touching the water but try as I might it just wasn’t a sharp enough or worthy of posting.  I tried but came up short.

After our initial success with the Walleye and a few Northerns that we threw back Angie did catch a nice Walleye that was borderline in size but we decided to keep it.   It turned out to be the last fish we would catch for the day, other than a few pesky Perch.  Each of the crew caught a Perch with each one being smaller than the first.

Finally the bugs and lack of activity convinced us to head over to Pelican Island to see if we could duplicate our success of the previous day.  Not a single bite did we get so Angie and Ben wanted to ride their jet ski and we were tired of getting eaten by the bugs.  Our plan was to take a few hours break and then hit it again later in the afternoon.

More tomorrow.  Enjoy your Holiday and be careful.