By The Lake

Everybody loves a nice day by the lake.

Expressionism

One of my favorite things about sports photography are the facial expressions of the players.  You can often gauge the level in intensity by the faces of the players.  And it seems that at any given moment, each  player will react to the play in their own way.

A Tough Lesson

Late last week my laptop hard drive failed.  Normally this would not be an horrible event as I am very good about regular backups.  However, I had been rearranging my portable drives and had deleted my older TimeMachine backups fully expecting to create a new one as part of the process.  For whatever reason, I did not do that before the drive failed.  Fortunately I had backups on another drive, but the most recent was from November, 2014.  I have spent the last couple of days and will spend the next couple of days, rebuilding my laptop from the foundation of that backup.  I’m glad I keep so much of my important media on external drives, it means that I will be able to get back to about 90% of where I was before the crash.  But, there are files that I lost and will never see again.

As if most of you know, backups are vital to prevent catastrophes such as mine.  I hope this post will serve as a reminder to others, BACKUP OFTEN!

Furniture

Night time observation as I drove through Red Wing, MN.  (iPhone 5S, tweaked in LR CC)

Abandoned by the Band

Drifting Above the Reef

Canon 5D Mk2, Tamrom 60mm, ISO 800, f/ 3.5, 1/2000 sec.

Can I Blame Climate Change?

I had hoped to post my follow-up to Lessons Learned yesterday, but as often happens, life had other plans for me.  Not that the outcome would have been any different, yesterday and today were warmer than the day I shot the original images, which meant that the frost did not form in quite the same way.  However, the weekend promises to be much colder so I may get a second chance to reshoot the frost.

Lessons Learned

In Minnesota we are blanketed by very cold weather at the moment, which does not inspire me to run around outdoors with a camera.  As an individual who chooses to live in such a climate, I have learned to embrace the winter weather, but even I, and my camera, have limits.  However, as luck would have it, opportunity came knocking at the window which allowed me to shoot a winter phenomenon without going outdoors.  I only had a short amount of time before leaving for a sports shoot so I didn’t get my tripod out, that cost me a few shots that may have been much better.  On the upside, the window isn’t going anywhere, the frost will be back and I have a day off from sports.  Knowing I had the next day available should have caused me to delay shooting, but I couldn’t resist.  Today’s images are all handheld, depth of field is acceptable, but focus falls off around the edges too much for my taste.  I do like how the light source affects the images for the last three. Being able to reshoot with a tripod should make a difference and I will post those images tomorrow.

Observations of Yellow

A number of fellow bloggers I follow have a knack of spotting color patterns, which inspired me when I noticed this gentleman taking notes at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Winter’s Frozen Embrace

Happy New Year to all, hope you’ve enjoyed the holidays in whatever form you preferred to celebrate.  For me it was a very enjoyable break with family and friends, not much photography, but plenty of merriment.  However, my urge to wander with a camera overcame the comfort of home and off I went for a walk along the beach known as Park Point here in Duluth.  There had been strong winds coupled with freezing temps and the spray from the waves had coated everything near the water.  I present two images in color and two in black and white.  The specks imbedded in the icy coating are grains of sand that mixed in with the blowing spray.

Canon 5D Mk11, Tamron 28-200mm.