Well…that great new site that I was working on and finished lasted about two days before I started getting email about not being able to view things properly…argh! It turns out the code that iWeb produces doesn’t play well with Internet Explorer, so back to the old drawing board in Dreamweaver. I was hoping to simplify my web workflow to make posting updates a bit more efficient…we’ll get this sorted, and have a new site up in the not too distant future. If you are tired of using Internet Explorer, I would reccommend either Firefox or Safari. Both are free and are easy to install. Thank you all for your support and patience.

This past weekend was a blast! Jen and I took Quinn down to the beach for his first play session in the sand and water. Being his first time there, we had to get a few shots. As soon as we set him down, he went straight for the water…not really surprising seeing how we are both water people. It felt good to get back to shooting again, as many of you know that I have been away from the camera for a little bit (see below three posts). My wedding, engagement and family sessions are starting to book for the fall and for 2009. Please contact me if you would like to check my availability or have unanswered questions. Thank you for coming back to my blog.

Well, I am all healed now! I went to see the neurosurgeon last Thursday, did a few strength tests, got some x-rays, and was given the go ahead to take the dear neck brace off I have been in since the surgery. What a feeling! I now have two spectacular scars in my neck, one in the front where they put a plate over vertebra C6 & C7, and another one in the back so they could put a bar over the same two vertebra for more stabilization. My limitations now are to lift nothing more than 40 pounds for the next six weeks. At that point, I will have to head back to the doc one more time after some physical therapy for the stifness I am having now. I suppose this is normal, since I didn’t move my head for just shy of two months. The best thing is I can now lift my son, Quinn! I really did miss that connection with him. I could have him in my lap, but being able to pick him up is so much better now! I did ride my bikes around the neighborhood this weekend. It felt good, but it is going to take a bit of time to loosen up to where I can go on a long road ride again. Racing will have to wait until next season. This is a good point to focus on my photography anyway. Thank you everyone for all of the interest in my work lately. I am now cleared to get back to shooting…and here are a couple shots I did in my kitchen the other day…

April 12th marked Jen and I’s five year wedding anniversary! For the occaission, we went to Catalina Island for a few days. What a cool place. It was exactly what we needed although there wasn’t enough time to do everything we wanted, but…is there ever enough time when you are having fun? That gives us a great reason to go back. We stayed at a place called Hamilton Cove which is a condo complex built into the side of a cliff. We had a spectacular view off our balcony as you can see from the first two pictures in this series. We were lucky to hit it in the off season, so the rates were reasonable and the place came with a golf cart, way cool! That really made things nice to get around, as Hamilton cove is about a 10 minute cart ride to Avalon, where everything happens. Quinn was great the whole time! We took him for a swim for the first time…I think we are going to be spending A LOT of time at the beach with this guy. He loved the water!
I also experimented with some photography techniques. Avalon Harbor, at sunrise, was a perfect place to stitch a large panoramic picture together. The panoramic image below is 8 different images stitched together in Photoshop CS3. Doing this with a wide angle lens makes for a very interesting image. I also started fooling around with HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging. The third image down on the left is done this way. By exposing several different images for both the shadows and the highlights and layering them together, you can make a beautiful image in which you don’t lose the highlight or shadow detail…all of the information is right there, details across the whole range…very cool! I haven’t quite realized the full potential of HDR yet, but I will certainly be experimenting more with it in the future. I think some HDR portraits could be pretty awesome looking.
By the last day, I think Quinn was pooped from hiking, swimming, riding around in the golf cart and all the walking around…as you can see from the last image…haha!
Thanks for looking…

What an awesome race the Tour of California is! I went up to Pasadena with my friend Ryan to go see the final stage of the race. The final 25 miles or so was 5 laps around the rose bowl on a flat loop. The final laps were made even more exciting by the rain, as it seemed to follow the riders around the course. Every time they passed us it poured, then the rain would stop, then when they came by again, it poured. Actually it was like that pretty much for the whole week of racing with the exception of a couple sunny days on the time trials. I hope this year is a better one for cycling than last year. Those of you who follow cycling know what I mean. Here are a few pics from our day at the race. The first couple were from a BMX show before the race entered town, then we went to find a spot on the course just before the finish. The guy in the red was a stud! He was our front alone for about an hour on this closed circuit. That is a huge task, but the poor guy got caught on the final lap. The last couple images were of the main group coming in at about 40 mph for the final sprint about a minute behind the breakaway group. I like these images as they have two world champions in them. Paolo Betini and Tom Boonen. Thanks for looking…

Last weekend, I headed down to La Jolla Cove with my friend to do some bird photography. It has been a while since I have done any kind of wildlife photography. Sometimes my dog can be considered wildlife if there is a ball nearby, but that is a different story for a later time. The Cove is one of the best and as of recent, most well known places in the country for Brown Pelican photography. This time of year, it is particularly crowded with photographers, as the adult males are very colorful for the ladies…it’s breeding time! You will notice that I don’t have a single photo of pelicans. We got the spot where the pelicans kind of congregate a little after sunrise, and there were already a few people down there with really big lenses, and the gate was locked to keep people from disturbing the birds. I can’t justify spending $9000 on the lenses that some of these people had, for the number of days that I spend shooting birds, so it was time to get creative and find a different spot. We found a point to ourselves and the Terns and Cormorants were all over the place flying to and from the spot we had just left. Here we were able to get quite a bit closer, so a 400mm lens would suffice. Below are some of the images that I got from that morning. Terns are some of my favorite costal birds. The black hat that they wear and the bright orange beak just make them so striking. I caught a series of images with a Sea Gull grabbing one of the Terns tail feathers. I don’t know if they normally attack the little guys or not, but it was interesting to see.
The other birds that were in abundance were the Cormorants. In the shade they look like a black bird, but once the sun hit their feathers, the iridescence really shines, and you can see their bright blue eyes and neck. They are quite beautiful.
It was a great day, and I think I came back with some cool photos of these birds. Maybe I can get a pelican next time?