Another day in Baltimore. The trees were in full bloom, and I had to take my camera to get a few shots of them. As I was playing with the photo in Lightroom, I found the photo more appealing in black & white.
This shot was taken with my point-and-shoot Nikon S52. I guess I was inspired by some of John Caruso’s urban shots as part of his Project 365. John finds many interesting photos throughout the urban landscape — and though this is not as “urban” as you can get, it’s urban for Chicago suburbia.
I don’t think things could have gone any better during this photo shoot. Period.
I wanted to catch a sunrise at the beach before I left Miami. Unfortunately, the beach was about a 10 min drive from the hotel, and I didn’t have a car. I was planning on getting up alone, grabbing a cab to a public beach, and do my own thing. A gentleman who I hit it off with at the conference, Kevin Maire, wanted to go as well – so the both of us got up and took his rental car to the beach at 6am.
When I told my wife Kristi this part of the story, all she could say was “how romantic” 
It was a partly cloudy morning, which is great for sunrises, as the sun plays with the clouds is amazing ways. To cap it off, this fisherman strolled into frame early on in the morning, which created some added interest in the shot.
During the morning, I had boats going across the horizon, birds circling the water looking for breakfast — everything was going perfect! I took 500+ shots, and I swear to you, 200+ of them are solid keepers. Even Kevin with his cell phone camera got some great shots!
These shots are just proof of an amazing God, and I really felt His presence this morning.
I will post a “Miami Sunrise” collection in the coming weeks, so you can see the amazing shots. I picked this one because it’s a great HDR shot I took right at the end of the morning. I struggled if I should make it an HDR, because even the individual shots are amazing without the HDR-ness. I’ll include the non-HDR version in the post as well. Which one do you like better?
Non-HDR version:
This will probably be the first of many photos of Molly’s Pond during this Project 365 effort. Molly’s Pond in the pond right outside our house. I woke up “late” on Sunday morning — I had my alarm set for 5:30am, but either I didn’t hear it, I turned it off without knowing I did that, or it just didn’t go off period.
It was 7am when I woke up, and I stumbled down to the kitchen. I saw an amazing sunrise, fog on the still pond, and ducks going for a swim. It was game-time for me! I *very quickly* put some shoes on , grabbed my Canon XTi, and went outside.
130 shots later, I had a plethora of photos to pick from. I’m rather proud of myself, because I usually just shoot on Program mode and go nuts. Afterwards I either disappointed with the shutter speed (too slow and a bit blurry), DOF (too shallow for landscape), or wrong exposure (Program Mode overcompensating for something like the sun in this shot).
This time I was smart. First off, made sure I had the right aperture. I tried to stick around f/11. f/11 then pushed my shutter speed to 1/10 of a second, which would not work for handheld shots. I could grab my tripod, but that would have killed another 5 minutes. With time ticking away with the sunrise, that was not an option. I kicked the ISO up to get around 1/60 to 1/100 second.
Second, when the sun was directly in the picture, I went to manual and metered with the sun out of frame, set the shutter speed to *that* proper metering, and then brought the sun back into the shot. This was one of my last shots, and thought it was the best.
I’ll post the “rejects” from today and other days that the rejects I thought were “Project 365-worthy” in the coming weeks when I accrue enough rejects for a separate post.
My day job brings me to Baltimore a handful times of year. This time I brought my camera and will hopefully get some time to shoot. This shot is from my hotel room right when I checked in.
I walked into the hotel room, didn’t even turn on the light, and the photo was just there. I didn’t have a tripod, so I propped the camera on a couple books next to the window.
It’s so nice to drive home in daylight! Gone are the days of driving to work *and* back in the dark of night.
This shot is of Gray’s Lake, the lake for which our town, Grayslake, is named. The sun made me pull the car over and grab a quick shot with our Nikon S52 point-and-shoot.
The family and I headed to the Wisconsin Dells for a weekend of water park goodness. The first day in the park the sun shined in the many windows of the park, creating some great shots. Running around with my point-and-shoot, I dodged water trying to get this shot.
I know it has photographic flaws (light really blown in top left for starters), but sometimes a photo really grabs you regardless of the "flaws".
I love this one.
My daughter Ella has been taking swimming lessons at the YMCA. This past Friday the family went to the pool to see how Ella was progressing in her lessons and to prepare for our trip to a Wisconsin Dells water park!
