I enjoyed Easter this year down on Hilton Head. We’ve been very fortunate over the last 20 years to spend quite a bit of time with my wife’s family down there so we’re a bit spoiled.  We do know that one day we’ll have our own place down there but in the mean time we’ll enjoy and be thankful for the generosity of our family. It’s a very cool thing to have my kids hanging out with their GREAT grandparents.

This shot was of course taken on the beach. Typically there is not a lot of foreground subjects to add something interesting to the composition on the beach. Maybe some occasional logs or melting sand castle but I saw this boat with the bright green trim and I thought it would be nice for a chance to have one of my beach shots with something interesting to look at in the foreground.  It was a absolutely gorgeous morning and I had it to myself for almost an hour before the sun just got above the horizon and the beach was mobbed on queue by about 3000 joggers lol.

Work has been kicking my butt for the last few weeks so it’s been tough to get out and shoot lately. I’m looking forward to taking a few days off in the coming weeks to capture spring in the Smokies but spring is already coming to the Carolinas and last weekend I skipped out on dinner and caught some of the first vestiges of it with the beginnings of buds on this Oak (I think its an oak) by an old farm pond a little bit outside my town. There was a good bit of ripple on the water from a gentle breeze so i was a bit surprised by the quality of the reflection. As much as I look forward to catching great landscape shots I really look forward to having some solitude to slow down for a while. Definitely need to find some more time soon. Hope you enjoy the results of my solitude.

It just seemed like yesterday that I was evaluating the latest beta of Adobe Lightroom 4.  Well it would appear that last night after a short beta they have released the latest version of LightRoom and on the cheap as well. I haven’t been following the schedule but I think this came as a surprise for many Lightroom users. They have a nice promotion where a new license will run you about $150 and a upgrade will run you about $80. It’s got some pretty nice new features, nothing earth shattering IMO but a nice upgrade. My favorite I think is some of the new developer options, GPS Maps, and a new module to build out photo books. I started using Lightroom about a year ago and I probably use it for 80% of my photo processing (the other 20% is still in Photoshop).  I think I paid close to $300 for my license so if your on the fence now would probably be a good time.  You can checkout the Adobe Store for this special promotional offer.

Sadly this is my first post of the new year. I caught the whooping cough after Christmas and I’m still struggling at times. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. Unfortunately misery loves company and the whooping cough came to visit my father as well (I’m still sticking to the story that I got it from him!). For a disease you only here about in conjunction with the Pilgrims and other ancient times I guess it’s starting to make a come back because our vaccinations from childhood are starting to wear off. But enough of my sob story. This photograph was taken over the weekend while I visited Hilton Head South Carolina. I went on daily visits to the beach over four days and was only greeted with fog and more fog. I decided to think smaller and closer and captured this shot on a longer exposure on a rare morning when I beat the clouds and fog by a few minutes and still had some blue sky above and behind me to reflect some color into the water. Unlike many of my previous images this is not an HDR shot and other then some cropping there has been extremely little post processing on this one.

I was visiting some family this weekend and I got a chance to get a few shot’s of my father’s church in Ohio. I’ve been looking forward to getting some photographs with all the old hard woods, stain glass windows, and chandeliers within the church which always lends itself nicely to HDR photography (went not overdone that is). What I wasn’t expecting was all the distortion from my wide angle lens. I have been using my Sigma 12-24 for several months now but always with landscape photography. Not as much with architecture and strong lines. I was able to largely fix it up with Photoshop’s lens correction and distort functionality and the remaining is mostly acceptable but none the less I was a bit surprised the lens had such a high level of distortion. If anyone is interested let me know and I’ll post a before and after.

Work and family have kept me from heading out anywhere with the explicit intent of photography for a couple weeks. I’ve been working through processing some older photographs and reprocessing a few that I wanted to apply some new techniques on. Thats kept me busy but the withdrawal symptoms are starting up so I know I’ll have to get my fix soon. Last weekend I attended my second meeting of the Raleigh Outdoor Photography Club, actually their yearly potluck. Everyone got an opportunity to show off their ten favorite shots. THe shot above probably got the most response of all of mine and is the second part of the “Furry Cow” post from a couple weeks back. This shot is actually the other side of the field and was taken about 30 minutes before and I think has a little more eye candy.

I apologize for the dearth of posts lately. I’m slowly working to get more comfortable with my new Macbook Pro and OSX. Surprisingly enough for me it’s not been as big of a leap as I thought it was going to be moving from Windows (at least for my personal computer – I’m a software developer with MS tools so my work laptop will always be Windows). I’m extremely happy with the performance so far and I’m sure OSX is a zippy OS but I think it has more to do with the quad core, 8GB RAM, and the SSD then the OS. I had the stock 5400RPM drive in for a few hours before the SSD came in the mail and I noticed a very big difference before and after. My favorite aspect though is I can actually process my photos without twiddling my fingers for a few minutes every time I try to save or render a shot.

This photo is actually the first I’ve processed in a couple weeks and my first on my Macbook. I’ve adjusted my post processing workflow a bit so once I get it down to a point I like I’ll be sure to share it as I know a lot of folks like to see what other photographers do during post processing. This shot was taken a few weeks back on an unusually cold morning. The fence was annoying me a bit so I decided to try to use it in the shot as opposed to shooting over and around it. The farm is the last local farms around the corner from me that hasn’t been sold, is actively under development, or for sale. I think this will likely be the last season where I’ll catch this shot, at least with the barbed wire and rolled up . Gotta love progress lol.

I seem to be on a sunset & sunrise kick lately but they don’t ever really get old to me. I shot this on Route 70 out in Clayton North Carolina. As the brown death of late fall spreads across the country side I’ve been noticing a very green field that has grown in stark contrast to the surrounding trees and farms. I also noticed some very curious cows, well at least curious to those of use who aren’t cow aficionados. I’m very accustomed to the short haired spotted variety but these beasts remind me more of of buffalo with furry long brown hair covering their bodies. I thought I might catch one of these in the front for a nice foreground to add some depth to a wide landscape shot but unfortunately as much as it appears they liked the green grass it wasn’t enough to stick around as I pulled out my tripod and prepared for the shot. I don’t think I look too much like a predator but as you can see from the shot they all ended up in the back of the field melding into the landscape.

I visited Clemmons Education Forest last week hoping to catch the last of the fall colors and leaves at the park and maybe my last visit there for the year. This is a great local park but unfortunately it’s closed during the winter months (starting in mid November). But between you and me I think I might do some stealth hiking this winter at the park

On a previous post I showed a shot of the inside workings of Yates Mill in Raleigh North Carolina (USA). Yates Mill dates back to the 1700s and is the oldest still functional mill in North Carolina (and I would guess probably one of the oldest in the country). As promised this is an outside shot from the other side of Yates “Pond”. This was a couple weeks before fall colors really took off but there was a hint of change starting. I was going for the water\mirror affect and I was pretty happy with the results although I was hoping to return during the peak of fall colors for an even more dramatic affect but my schedule didn’t work out that way.