Upde Designs

Well Joshua is looking a lot better today.  He has had his first full day of life and according to Mom most of that has been asleep.  I finally got to hold him last night.  More pictures later as I have an early morning meeting today so no time to post many pictures.

I love this image of Angie and her new Son, Joshua.  Thanks for stopping by.  Hopefully more pictures tonight.:)

At 10:43 pm Joshua Michael Roling came screaming into the world.  Weighing in at a hefty 8 pounds 10 ounces and 21.5 inches long he was quite the little bundle.  Mother, Father and Baby are all doing fine.  He is a healthy young man and he seemed very content in his Mother’s arms.

When I looked in Ben’s eyes I saw wonderment and so much emotion.  It is that look that only a Father can have when he is looking at his child.  I was so incredibly happy for these two remarkable young parents.  Angie was so happy and amazed as she gazed into her Son’s eyes and then into Ben’s.  What a beautiful sight.

Grandma had to get a hold in before we left.  Ben’s Mother and Brother David were also there so it was a very busy place.  The nurse shooed us out so  the family could have some time together and see if the lad was hungry enough to learn how to eat.

Mark shared a special moment with his Sister.  I was proud of him for coming over and being with her at the time of the birth of his new Nephew.  I didn’t get a chance to hold him tonight but I will soon  The proud parents have announced his name this morning.  They had some time to get acquainted with him and then chose his name.  I like Joshua (of course Grandpa will call him Josh.)   God Bless you Ben, Angie, and Josh Roling.

As of 9:30 pm this is the story.  Hurry up and wait.  Nothing doing yet.  We’re expecting a call sometime around midnight but for right now it is just wait.

Both Ben and Angie are tired as they didn’t get much sleep last night.   Angie is doing fine and is comfortable.  I am happy that Mark left right after class today and has committed to staying until his new Nephew is welcomed into the world.

Stay tuned.  Thanks for stopping by.

Here is an image I took a couple of weeks ago at the “Duck Pond.”  Actually it is part of the Interpretive Center near Maquoketa, but most people just call it the Duck Pond.  This was the week before daylight savings ended so it was one of my last after work photos until next Spring.

The “neat” thing about this image is that it is not what it seems.  If you have time click on the Photoshop tab above and read how this image was made.  Hope you enjoy it.

Thanks for stopping by.

For as many years as I can remember Mark and a bunch of his friends have played touch football on 2nd weekend in November.  The neat thing about it is that the opposing team is made up of Dubuque Police Officers.

So today was the annual game and they play two one hour quarters.  Mark’s team even had some uniforms (well sort of ) this year.  Looked pretty spiffy.  The temperature was 38 degrees with a 9 mph wind so it made for a very cold day.  On top of that it was raining.

Jeanne and I went down and watched for 35 minutes.  We both wimped out after that and so at half time we trucked on home.  Since we only live 500 yards away from the field that wasn’t too long of a walk.

This was the highlight for us at least of what we got to see.  Mark was heavily defended and went up for a pass.  It went through his fingers but as you can see here it was thrown too high for him to have a realistic chance at it.

I had fun shooting the game but I was really cold I used my Tamron 200-500mm lens and the Nikon D700 set at ISO 800.   I switched from RAW to JPG after a few shots because I realized most of the shots were going to be throw aways.

Thanks for checking out my blog.

Upde

I found this place on the Internet where you can create your own tee-shirt and market it to others.  They do all the work for you and you get a small percentage of the profits.  That was not my intent when I designed this tee-shirt nor is it now.

I had used another company sometime ago to design a shirt and I put an image of the kids on it.  I wore it once and it was terrible.  The image faded, the colors were all wrong  in the image.  It just wasn’t a quality shirt.

I was reading a blog the other day and the writer had designed a shirt that said “got PSD?” Which is the native format that all Photoshop files are saved in.  (i.e. yourimage.psd)  Anyway I ordered one and it was a high quality shirt and very comfortable.

I’ve had this idea for sometime so I designed my shirt that says “I’ve Been Photoshopped”  It has the selection arrow and my signature on it.  The shirt sells for $28.00 shipped in so I don’t expect nor do I want to sell any.  I just think it is a cool tee-shirt.  Oh by the way I offered Jeanne one and she just smiled at me and said “No thanks.” 😦

Pretty exciting day in the life of my little girl.  She and Ben went to the Quad Cities today and picked up her brand new Lexis.  She was so excited to give us a ride in the new car.

Lots of neat features.  It was so much fun watching her and Ben enjoy all the gadgets and all the voice commands they have.  It has rear view camera, hands free-calling and on board programing computer.  Seven seats and the wonderful new car smell.

I’ve had three new cars in my life.  The first one I bought when I was 19.  I had a great job and was making pretty good money so I bought a brand new Chevrolet Chevelle for $3, 500.00.  Then while in college I bought a new Volkswagen Bug, which was yellow.    The third new car was a 2000 Chrysler Concord (I had to buy that when my other car gave out on me.)  I hated that car with a passion. 🙂

I’m so happy for Ben and Angie and their life together.  As you can tell by the images our little Grandson is due any day now.  Then I’ll have lots of photo opportunities.  Thanks for stopping by.

Congratulations Kids!

I was actually pretty excited about today.  A holiday from work and the full day to shoot images.  I was also going to meet my daughter for lunch so this had the makings of a banner day of photography.

I was reading a photo blog this morning after breakfast and one of the images in the photographer’s portfolio was this beautiful rock canyon  and in the middle of the scene was a parking meter.  I thought to myself I have a parking meter I can do that.  Of course I don’t have a beautiful rock canyon handy but I do have the parking meter.

So after trying many different shots none of which were worth a damn I came back to the house and set the meter on the back patio and let Maggie out.  She went right to the meter and I was lucky enough to get this image. (better than nothing)

So then I went to meet Angie for lunch and it was very enjoyable.  Her Son is getting so large and she is so uncomfortable.  He should be here soon.  🙂  Anyway we had a great lunch and then I decided to go look for something interesting to shoot.  I was walking back to my car and saw this sign and took a quick photo of it.

Hard to believe but after two hours of driving around this was the most interesting object I could find to shoot.  Apparently it just wasn’t my day.

Okay, well I was going through my images from today and the more I looked at this one the more I thought it had possibilities.  I cropped it  and enhanced the color a little bit and it make an interesting image.

Thanks for stopping by.

Well this has been a bummer of a week so far.  With the elimination of day light savings time it is pitch dark when I leave work now, even if I’m lucky enough to get out close to five o’clock it is way too dark to take any landscape images.

So on the way to work this morning I was lamenting that for the next three months I won’t be able to shoot any good images on the way home and then I got to noticing the sky.  The clouds were masking the morning sun, which was a bright orange and they were at different altitude levels, which made them look very interesting.

I thought I can always use some good cloud shots to insert into images that have a bum sky so I pulled off the road and shot a dozen or more images of the colored sky.  This is the best one of the bunch.

Thanks for stopping by.  Leave a comment if you like.

I normally get up around 4:15 am every morning.  Don’t ask me why, I just do.  I love to read at that time of day, work on photos and get set for the day ahead.  Anyway I decided this morning that I would go down to the river and shoot a sunrise.

When I got down to the river walk there was no good image to shoot to use as a silhouette against the rising sun.  I took the above image without any enhancement, the sky was really that blue.  Well almost that blue 🙂

So it was clear that I hadn’t done my home work and didn’t know where exactly was the best place to be for the sun rise.  I also wasn’t dressed properly and I nearly froze.    Finally the sun came up and I didn’t get one decent shot except for the first one of this post.  Pretty sad when you consider I shot 94 images.  Good thing they are free.  Sort of 🙂

I walked around the welcome center and saw a bunch of tugs in the harbor with the rising sun shining on them.  I liked this image but I was so cold by the time I took this I could hardly feel the camera in my hand.

Thanks for stopping by.