Sharing Time

I thought I would share a couple photos that I've taken over the last few years that I'm pretty proud of. Hope you enjoy em!

A Fan

I took this several years ago at the Denver Zoo, during that time of year that the Girl Scouts do their annual cookie drive. The city had allowed a couple troops (is that the right term?) to setup tables and sell their wares at the entrances. Well it didn't take much time at all before the park was just littered with these annual treats.

We had arrived at the zoo pretty late in the day so the cookie litter was especially bad.

As we were heading out of the park this little guy darted out from under the bushes that line the walkway to grab this Thin Mint from off the sidewalk. He was so enamored with getting his sugar fix that he didn't care how close I got to him...that or he was in a sugar educed haze from a day of binging. At any rate I was able to get right up on em for this photo.

I took this with a little pocket 3.1 MP camera that had no zoom on it at all...I really was able to get that close.

Bee at Aurora State Park - July 2004

Should I find it a bit odd that some of my favorite photos are ones that I took when I was just getting into photography and had only very basic equipment? Haven't I improved at all over the years?

The title pretty much tells you the relevant details of this photo. I was out biking on a Summer afternoon on a weekday that I had taken off of work. This was early on in my journey of learning some of the basics rules of photography. One of them, that I didn't really agree with, is that mid-afternoon...especially during the summer...is a bad time of day for shooting photos. The general consensus is that the light intensity is way too strong and the sun's position doesn't make for flattering shadowing. Well I think this photo flies in the face of that convention. Although I have to admit that I did wait for some cloud cover get sunshine on my subject while softening the lighting on the flowers around it.

This was taken with the same pocket 3.1 MP pocket camera...but the lens was set to "macro" instead of "landscape."

Ruedi

I have always admired photos like this, great scenes with very moody lighting and I could never seem to reproduce results like this for myself, until I tried some very early morning photography.

This was taken last summer when my boss and I got up very early, 3:00 AM to be exact, to drive an hour up to the local reservoir to do some boat fishing before putting in a full day's work. (He was happy to finally find someone who could keep up with the feverish pace he sets for himself, and still be able to sneak in some fishing before starting the day.) Normally we would go up and try a few spots on the lake without much luck and pack it in by sevenish. This particular morning was pretty cold, windy and cloudy. In fact, it start to snow as we pulled out of the water...that's Summer in the mountains for you. : ) Just as we were pulling up to the dock I looked behind me and saw the scene that I had been trying to recreate on camera for a couple years. I took several frames of this scene but the one I liked the most was just a tad underexposed.

I really like not only the lighting but how the deep reds, greens and blues play against each other. I'm really proud of this one.

I took this on my Canon 10D. (After a couple years of getting into photography I took the annual ski pass that the company I was working for gave to us and turned it into cash. I love this camera it is just below professional grade and has an all metal frame...which is hard to find in a digital camera without shelling out some serious dough.)

Three Stairs

While this isn't considered by some to be a "photo" this did start out as a regular old picture, but it has gone through some heavy post-processing in Photoshop...and I think it's so much the better for the trouble.

I took this during my "looking for patterns" phase of learning. I wish I still had the original photo for comparison to see how much more interesting the final result is with the intensifying of the colors, a slight impressionist treatment, and really cranking up the blues in the windows. I can't really tell you what I "like" about this photo other than it just works for me.

I took this one with my Canon 10D on a Saturday while at work. This building faces the balcony of the 2nd floor of an office building that I used to work at. Needless to say Saturday's were normally slow and boring and it was no big deal to wonder off a few feet away from my desk waiting for the phone to ring.