Joy

We went to Galveston on Sunday to get out in the wonderful mid-70’s temps and bountiful sunshine.

It was also a great opportunity to get out and shoot some pictures. I’m still processing from the weekend but should have some updates coming soon.

In the meantime, I wanted to share this picture Cynthia got. I just love it, and not just because it’s of me (although it’s a contributing factor).

Sure, it shows I am a lot grayer in the beardal area these days, but the expression of pure joy on my face would tend to indicate I don’t much care about such things.

Plus I don’t have many shots with the new glasses so you might just consider this a facial recognition update.

The Slanket

I was browsing Jeff Balke’s blog and caught his post about a thing called a “Slanket”

From the Slanket web site:

The Slanket is a Gigantic fleece blanket with loose, oversized sleeves so you never feel constricted and you have total control of how to use them, while staying toasty. The Slanket is made of a thick and warm 310 gsm fleece that feels very soft on the skin. The slanket is great on a couch, a chair, in a hammock, on your bed or anywhere else you care to take it.

What a revolutionary idea!

This has to be the most exciting development in blanket technology since the invention of the electric blanket.

I contacted the folks who make The Slanket about getting my hands on one to review for Technology Bytes and they quickly and kindly obliged me with a forest green Slanket.

There’s nothing Cynthia likes more than being warm and comfortable. She gets a modest amount of use out of her electric blanket which I got her for Christmas in 2001 and I figured she would be the best arbitor of the pros and cons of this new technology.

Here you can see Cynthia with The Slanket browsing her favorite web site, Amazon.com.

As you can see, The Slanket allows her to spend our life savings on more books while she remains toasty warm and snug as a bug in a rug.

Cynthia is a Slanket convert and, as of this writing, refuses to return The Slanket to me.

Ah well, we’ll just consider it an early anniversary present.

Signs of Spring

Signs of Spring
Click for larger image

Up until a few months ago I did not know the word “bokeh.”
Then Shari came by and commented on one of my photographs and said “All really nice, but especially lovely bokeh on the first one” which sent me to Google for some research.

Turns out that attractive blurriness has a name! Well what do you know?

I’ve always liked it but never really thought about it as a concept, rather I saw it as a byproduct or artifact.

Now it’s something I like to strive for in certain shots. This one I accomplished with the new 75-300mm lens at the full 300mm focal length and close range. The thumbnail is designed to make the picture fit easily within the blog. You should really click for the full sized version to see the picture as intended.

Photography weekend – Part 2

Sunday was shaping up to be an even better day than Saturday so we decided to slack on the chores and go out shooting pictures again.

I had been hearing a bit about the West 11th Street Park and figured we could go there and at least have a look around. In one of the reports I had heard on NPR they indicated the park had some interesting wildlife.

When we got there, it really didn’t look all that interesting. In fact, we were about to just drive on past it and look for something else when we noticed three ladies coming out of the park toting binoculars. I decided to swing around and ask them if there was any interesting birds in the park. All three exclaimed that yes indeed, there was all manner of Woodpeckers, Hawks and even a Great Horned Owl in that park. They offered to show us the Horned Owl as they had just come from where he was nesting.

The ladies took us down the path and into the woods and we came to the base of a stand of trees. They pointed to the sky and described where in the top of a very tall tree the owl could be seen. Cynthia and I craned our heads skyward and peered into the trees but could see nothing.

After about 5 minutes of explaining which branch off of which tree and so on and so forth Cynthia finally exclaimed that she could see the owl. A minute later I spotted him as well.

Great Horned Owl
Click to see full sized image

Time to see what the new 300mm zoom lens can do.

This was shot a the full 300mm handheld. That is to say, no tripod.

Great Horned Owl
Click to see full sized image

You gotta love image stabilization.

We admired the owl for awhile and then set off to explore the park.

The next creature we encountered was a hawk.
You could see him flying in circles high above the tops of the trees.

Distant Hawk
Click to see full sized image

SUPER TELEPHOTO XPEALADOSSHAS!

Hawk
Click to see full sized image

Again, totally handheld. Amazing.

That allowed me to crop this out:

Hawk
Click to see full sized image

Even more amazing was the shot Cynthia got with her Pentax with the 320mm telephoto:

Hawk picture by Cynthia
Click to see full sized image

And from that we were able to extract this:

Hawk picture by Cynthia
Click to see full sized image

What a wonderful couple of sightings!

As we were leaving we heard the familiar tak-tak-tak sound, indicating that a woodpecker was nearby.
Looked up and sure enough, there he was!

Woodpecker
Click to see full sized image

We left the park and headed home. But before calling it quits we had one more stop.

Terry Hershey Park

If you get off the main bike trail and onto some of the footpaths you can really have some cool creature moments. I found this Egret hunting fish in a small pond:

Egret
Click to see full sized image

It was a great weekend for taking pictures!

QR Code Business Card