Hawai'i photos

First off, I use Photoshop Elements 8, thanks for asking Corey. I meant to reply back to you but forgot. Anyway, it has been great, although I use maybe 0.05 percent of its capabilities at the current time. So here are the pictures (okay only 4 of the 448 I took while in Hawai'i). This Nate running on the beach. Hickam AFB is right there close by and they rent snorkle gear cheap so we went there for the day. Snorkling there is terrible, but for a first timer like Nate it was good to get him in the water and get some experience. This was shot using the 18-55mm lens and then cropped using ADP Elements 8. A lot of my photo's from the trip have a bluish filter to them, the result of shooting with the light meter set for flourescent lighting and not changing it back. Funny when I adjusted the camera for Nate, Kaye or the unsuspecting tourist to take our picture the bluish tinge went away. I will one day figure out there is an "Auto" function that will adjust for lighting. Anyway, the camera was set for 1/500 with f/14.
On one of the days where we had time to bum around we went looking for the northshore and missed it by hitting the east side of Oahu (we didn't have a map, and yes, pilots are navigationally challenged). The larger photo has the black volcanic rock and the surf coming in, this is cropped. I liked the way the water looked in the left side of the picture. My attempt at being artistic.

It wouldn't be a Hawai'ian vacation without any photos of a surfer. No, I didn't attempt surfing, I value my neck and the ability to walk, looks like fun though.

We went to the island version of Sea World and did the dolphin encounter. Afterward the did the dolphin show. This guy is about 10 feet in the air when I snapped this picture using my 55-200mm lens. I set the camera in the sports mode for action (hence the picture looks normal not heavy on the blue) and then for continuous shooting for multiple picutres. I was zoomed out to 110mm on the lens and then cropped it using ADP Elements 8. If you zoom in you can see sheets of water, like on a car that is in the rain.

One on One

Saturday was beautiful and instead of sitting in the house after Nathan's basketball game we went outside and shot baskets. Kaye and Nathan were showing off their basketball "skillz" while I practiced my photography. At least they could move and I could shoot with no complaining from the natives about taking to long to take my pictures. Nathan's skills have really improved this year in basketball. Although he is no Michael Jordan yet, he has gotten better. As he gets taller and develops a little more strength, he may give me a run for my money.
You can see that he is the perfect height to stick his hand in Kaye's face and disrupt her vision. I give him another year and then she may be in for a more difficult game when he is looking her in the eye's or worse yet, looking down on his mother. Really, he's supposed to be this tiny baby that fit so nicely in the crook of my arm, like a football!

As you can see, he has some mad dribblin' skillz as well. Kaye hurt for the rest of the day, knee's, ankle's, wrists etc. from the game.

This picture is proof that we do not have a flat driveway. It slopes away from the house and provides a less than stellar basketball court, but we make do. The free throw line is just a little far for him yet. He has a better average from the line than Shaq does though.

Before I bought my camera I heard that you should take pictures from high and low angles, not just the angle that someone who is six foot one would always see. I broke out the ladder and grabbed a few pictures as well. This one was, I think the best of the group. I used the smaller of my two lenses, 18-55mm shooting at 1/1000 and f7.1 with the lens set at 18mm. This would be a really cool picture with even a wider angle on the lens to distort the edges giving a more "fish eye" type look to the photo.

Time Exposures, Fire and Snow.

The other night we bar-b-qued and I decided to light a fire in the fire pit we bought last year. Might as well get our money's worth from the thing. Of course not wanting to miss out on a chance to use my camera, I had a couple of things I wanted to try out. One was a time exposure using the ambient light to get some stars etc. What I wound up with was the reflected light of the fire on the underside of the branches of some of the trees in the back yard. I thought it looked pretty good on the small screen when I saw it, but it looks better when you see it blown up in a larger image. Not sure the blog will do it justice but overall not bad for the effect. I tried to get a picture of Orion's belt but my inexperience with the camera started to show when I couldn't get it to focus and for some reason it didn't want to take the photograph. Well, I had better get into the owner's manual a little more.
The other thing I wanted to try was another time exposure, this time with the fire in the foreground. Nathan was patient at first but started to get antsy, with "Hurry up Dad!" Hey, kiddo, perfection takes time! Anyway, this was the best of the shots, he moved the least here. I used the 55-200mm lens, should have switched to the 18-55mm lens but was too lazy and the natives were getting restless.

Last picture was from the snow we received a couple of weeks ago. This picture may look a little better cropped but my time is spent typing my Masters paper currently so I have don't have time to mess with Photoshop right now. Maybe in a few more weeks when I am Masters complete.

On Sundays, Kaye and I go for a walk to get out of the house and stretch our legs. It helps get the juices flowing after sitting in church most of the day. I try to bring my camera along for the walk, although I have met with some stiff objections of late, something about stopping every 10 feet or so. I just tune those complaints out and bring it along anyway.

The windmill is along the way as we walk around the neighborhood. I tried to take this photo four or five times and had forgotten that I had the camera set up to take pictures of Nathan's basketball games. Really I need to take a class in photography so I can utilize my camera to its full extent.