Clean up, clean up, everybody cleanup

I have been staring at monitors for about 5 hours now, and decided to take a break from it for a few minutes - by typing a blog on my monitor. Silly Ken. I have been organizing and editing images in Lightroom. I finally decided that just knowing where the files are isn't good enough any more. Here is a little photo I took while on holiday in 2007 on Kauai. I just like the simplicity of it. I'm really not a flower photography type, but I like to keep my options open.

Lighting tests

I use studio strobes for rim lighting when I'm at my studio, but had never really tried it with my speedlights. I do a lot of different styles of lighting with the speedlights, but wanted to experiment. I didn't get exactly what I wanted, but was happy with a few of the shots we did.
This is Dylan, my willing victim of photo geeking. I think I got about a dozen shots before he started goofing, flexing and yelling "gadoosh!" That was when I knew we were done.

Walking around photos

Back to Vegas. One of the nights in Vegas, we walked from Mandalay Bay to the north. We saw an "in and out burger" that we were really hungry for. I haven't had one of their burgers for 4 or 5 years - the last time I went to SoCal.
Anyway, we were stopped by a freeway which had no access to the other side. We walked a few blocks east, trying to find a bridge, but to no avail. To make a long story short- 14 hours of exploring, way too much walking, blisters, tired, sore, neck was even chaffed from my "sling bag" - I had to carry my camera for 2 days by hand because I couldn't war my bag any more for the pain.
This photo is of one of the parking lots being built for a new casino being built. It was about 12:30 and I liked the lines of the structure in the dark. I never really thought about how many people work in one of those monstrosities. I was told that 6-7,000 people work in a couple of the larger casinos. To put this into perspective, Nintendo of America only has about 1,000 employees across the country. Wow.

Ah, cooking. One of my favorite things. I love vegies and fish - oh, and PASTA!!!! This was an exercise in evening (Guinness induced) photography at the end of a very long day. I like the motion of the noodles and the steam. I am taking some media classes at the local community college to get my web chops up, and had to do an assignment in color balance. In case you are wondering, this photo was only sharpened a bit, and a bit of a vignette added to knock the corners off. The rest is all done in the camera. I love post-processing images, but like to keep things simple when I am just doing things for experiments. The funny thing is that the original concept for the photo was to just shoot the knobs of the stove, with only one knob in focus. I didn't even shoot that idea, I thought of putting the pot on the stove, just for a different angle on the stove, plus having a little more visual interest. Next, I thought, "boiling water in the pot would be nice". Next, I decided that there should be a little motion in the image, since it is one of my favorite overall things to shoot.
For you photo geeks who may be curious, this was lit almost completely by the hoodlight over the stove and the regular kitchen lights. There was a bit of fill from a silver disk to the camera left, but that was it. This was a 2 second exposure at f8.

Another Cascade Corporation photo

Here is a before and after image of worm gears that are manufactured by Cascade Corporation. I never really thought about how worm gears and sprockets were made.
I don't just geek out about camera equipment. I love metal work and I felt like making Tim Taylor grunts the whole time I was in the warehouse. All of the cutting, welding, and grinding going on was pretty cool to see.

Portland Lift Truck Parts Manufacturer Picture

Cascade Corporation, a worldwide lift truck part manufacturer, whose headquarters are located in Wood Village, Oregon let me come to their warehouse to shoot some images for a school project. I hadn’t done industrial shots of that nature before, and they were very open to letting me walk around and take shots. I used mostly ambient light, with small splashes of strobe here and there to either fill in shadows or to bring a little more interest to the subject. The building was well lit, but for production, that means that the work areas are evenly lit, so the workers don’t have to strain to see because of shadows on what they are working. I had a blast, and the people in the different work areas were very helpful, either acting normal, or telling me when they were going to do something visually interesting.

Photo for the day - Vegas flashback

I love living in the Northwest. I drove from Portland to Seattle yesterday, and in the 3 hours that it took to get here, I saw every weather pattern the Northwest gets. We started in Sandy, Oregon (my stomping grounds), where we had about 4 inches of snow. That was a great surprise, because it's been raining nonstop since we got back from Vegas. We drove our dog to the Kennel in Boring, Oregon, where we drove through about 16 inches of water that was crossing the highway. The rest of the way, we got hail, freezing rain, rain, snow -little wet flakes AND the huge flakes that make driving difficult- overcast, and completely sunny.
I woke up waaaaayyyy too early this morning in my Seattle hotel room and wanted something to do. I realized that I didn't really do any processing on the images from my Las Vegas holiday. I edited them down to my favorites and ran them through Lightroom and posted them to my Flickr account right here
I carried my Lensbaby 3 with me on all the trips, but was too lazy to put it on the camera. One night, as we were wandering around, I was inspired by all the christmas lights to put the Lensbaby on and do some shooting with it. I love that lens - I need to get the Composer version one of these days.
....Anyway, as we wandered through every casino on the strip, I took some time to smell the flowers with my camera. Here's one of the results
Enjoy.

Happy New Year!!!

I hope that everyone enjoyed Christmas and is looking forward to the new year. I spent Christmas week in Vegas and had a blast! I was glad to get home after that week. I missed the huge snowstorm that buried the Portland area and am okay with it. We stayed at the Stratosphere, which is at the far north end of the strip - about 4 miles away from the other end of the strip. We had a few down days, but we had 12 and 14 hour days walking around. I shot about 600 photos - hey, I was on holiday.Here's a photo for today. It is a wide angle view of Kim - my accountant, wife, babysitter, base of the pyramid...... She was sitting on the edge of the dolphin pool at the Sigfried and Roy park at the Mirage. The dolphins were done playing and the other tourists were being annoying, so we took a little breather and enjoyed the sun.