Ivan and I were killing some time in downtown, and I decided I wanted to shoot something.  We ended up in Old Sac, and he had the brilliant idea of trying to get access to the third deck of the Delta King, with the iconic Tower Bridge in the background.  The manager was nice enough to let us up there, and so we just put together a fun experimental shoot at night on Sacramento’s beloved Delta King riverboat hotel and restaurant.

I’m still working with my very less-than-adequate strobes, and it was pretty dark, so I was working with fairly long shutter speeds, between .5 and 4 seconds, depending on other settings.  Overall it was an interesting experience.  Basically, I learned to not wait until it’s actually dark to make a dark background.  A 30 minute jump on the shoot and I’m sure it would’ve come out better.  Either way, it was fun, we got some relaxing productive time, and basically had a good evening to end the weekend.  I’m just thankful that Ivan puts up with my crap while I’m trying to figure out crazy stuff like this, it’s much appreciated.

Anyways…  Technical details, summed up (it’s late, I’m tired):  The Minolta firing through the shoot-through camera right up close, the Phoenix firing bare about twice the distance as the Minolta, from camera left feathered behind him a bit.  Canon EF 50mm f/1.8, ISO 800, .5/sec @ f/11.

Albeit a nicely textured tree, with an interesting anomaly from where a branch impeding my driveway was lopped off, but it’s just a tree nonetheless.  And it’s these kinds of shots that I don’t take very often…  Again, however, this was derived while playing around with that borrowed 70-300mm Sigma lens, and thought it merited a late-night Sunday posting.

Primarily, I’m just trying to keep myself motivated to post content, build up some decent level of photos, so I could actually look like, oh, you know, a real photographer.  I’ve always been looked at as “the photographer” (at least since I started all this nonsense years ago), however I’ve never really had a quality body of work.  Yeah, there’s my Flickr page, which definitely has some interesting stuff, but it also has a large amount of crap and personal stuff.  Not great for showcasing what I do, and what I can do.  And again, not like a picture of an amputated tree does that any better, but I think you get the point.

Anyways…  I need to head to bed soon here, so I’ll cut the rant.  But if there’s one thought that’s on my mind every day it’s that I need to shoot more, geek out over gear less, and get some actual PEOPLE in front of my lens.  For a socially inept nerd like myself, if it doesn’t involve a bass, a stage, and loud rock music coming from me and a few friends, I’m a horrid people person, so this is frightening to me.  Although I know I just need to do it…

But as I said, that’s enough out of me for now…  Good night, internets!

Last weekend, my wife and I went backpacking for an overnight trip at Eagle Lake, in the south Tahoe National Forest.  It was a crazy four-plus mile hike in on what was supposed to be a “beginner” trail.  Beginner my ass.  Whoever wrote about the trail and said “small children and healthy elderly can do this no problem” either is high on psychotropics, or is surrounded by people from Krypton.

Either way, we made the crazy hike in, set up camp, had a nice relaxing evening recouping from severe exhaustion hehe, and then dreaded the next day when we had to pack up and head back up the crazy steep trails.

All in all though, it was fun, and once again have been reminded of the fact that I really don’t excel at nature/landscape photography.  Like, at all.  But, I had to post at least one photo from the trip, this being the best out of the bunch that I don’t plan on making HDRs out of later.  Maybe I’ll post those too.

Oh, and we took our dog, Pugsley, too.  He was definitely more than a handful, but he had fun.  Got dirty as can be, but had fun.  I’m sure I’ll post some rather funny pics of him later on in the week.

Got ambitious and decided to do another quick Napa photo…  Feedback is definitely appreciated.  And now, time to lay off the pics as the allergies are kicking my eyes’ asses.

Overlooking the baby grape vines at Caymus Vineyards, Napa, CA.  This is a relatively new vineyard that Caymus started a few years ago, and has yet to see it’s first crop.  Great environment though, and the grapes will most likely be stand-out quality.

Also note that instead of just my name on the watermark, I now have a spiffy little logo-ish thingy.  Cracked this out in CS4 a few weeks ago and am just now getting around to getting it sized for a watermark.  I think it looks pretty snappy, but we’ll see how it grows (or wears) on me.