Palmer Lake again.

We went up to Palmer Lake again. After we got there this storm started blowing up and it began to get cloudy. It was rather difficult to row the boat across the lake with fighting the wind which was blowing us toward the north end of the lake. 

It was a little choppy at times too which didn't help.
Really not the best environment for composing images but I work with what I have available to me at the moment.
In this image you see a fence on the left side. That's the border for a wildlife preserve that's closed to the public and they don't allow anyone in. Anyway that wasn't intended as the subject. The pathway, and the lake was. So were the clouds which seemed to add a foreboding element to the composition.

Then I had to take a couple of images of the clouds themselves.

This is a bit of the wildlife preserve.

I tried doing a rather slow image of the water by the dam. I was hoping it would smooth out the water to make it a bit glasslike and that the trees on the shoreline would reflect on it. Still, it ended up being a rather cool composition.

Have a great day. I'll get out again soon and capture a few more images to share with you.

Seven Bridges Trail

Today we went up to North Cheyenne Canyon Park. It's a wonderful, wild, scenic area where scenic images are available by the score. Through the park runs several trails, one of which is Gold Camp Road, now mostly a trail. Motorized vehicles are not allowed on this road. Back in the late 1800's it was where the railroad to Cripple Creek was. 

The image below is a guy walking his two dogs on Gold Camp Road.

This is near the beginning of Seven Bridges which branches off of Gold Camp Road. I wanted to test out what I was planning to use, the ND8, and ND4 filters stacked. The first two were done with the ND8 alone and are 2 second exposures.

This one is an 8 second exposure and I was stacking the ND4 also. From there I continued to shoot with the two filters stacked. Lengthening out the shutter speed like that makes the flowing water look ghostly. It's cool. For most of these the minimum shutter speed is 5 seconds.

For this one I also stacked the 2ND filter on top of the others. Oh, I did find out my maximum shutter time is 8 seconds. This image was an 8 second one.

IDK why but I've always thought these kinds of plants are cool. Every once in a while I'll photograph one.

Hope you enjoyed this little getaway. You should go on one of your own now. We all get too caught up in every day events that are usually beyond our control and we can do little about. These days there's all of that nasty political stuff too.
Have a great day and try to enjoy your life a bit.

Palmer Lake redux

Susan finished her billiards finals today. Afterward we went up to Palmer Lake again. This time with an inflatable boat I just bought. We crossed the lake and since I haven't rowed a boat for a long time it was an exercise in patience. I wasn't doing a good job at first of getting it to go where I wanted it to.

Once Susan started fishing I went wandering off and tried to find something to photograph. There really wasn't much however until I came upon these Canadian geese, with a full set of goslings in the grass of an adjoining wildlife refuge. 

Normally they would spend the summer in Canada, and Minnesota, but there is one pair that likes it here. Apparently living is really good because they had five goslings. Normally they would have two, or three, goslings at the most. My understanding is a pair will mate for life. Usually for the winter they south to South America. It's amazing journey of about 22,000 miles.

In the first frame is right after I spotted them in the grass, and then I followed them as they went. I didn't want to get too close, and yet, I couldn't help myself but get a bit closer. A couple of these images I can't wait to get up on Viewbug. It was definitely the bright spot of the day and now I'm sharing them with you dear reader, and viewer. I hope you enjoy the show.

Have a great day.

Billiards competition

Any event that occurs can become a opportunity to make some good images. I'm a firm believer in that. Yesterday there a APA semi finals. Pretty much the best so far for the season are who qualifies to be in the competition. I figured it would be an excellent opportunity to capture a few images.
I'll note there's a bit of shutter lag because the lighting in the bar is rather crappy. Action shots are difficult therefore. I had to set the ISO at 1600 on my Fuji. At first I considered using my FLD filter but in my test shots it didn't seem to me the fluorescent lights were casting much of a hue. Out of 38 images I had six that seemed to be usable, one of which I included on my Viewbug account.

I liked the way the balls were sitting on the table in this image during one of the matches.

This is one of the action shots I was attempting. I apparently moved the camera slightly while I was capturing the image which caused a slight amount of blur. It probably would have been worse though if the camera didn't have some image stabilization built in.

This is the one I included on Viewbug. The blur from the hand, and the ball, I think added to the composition, and the image did get one peer award.

I haven't seen too many images where the camera is looking down the stick. It's kind of a different angle and this one I will probably include on Viewbug when I can upload again. Since I have a free account I'm limited on how many I can put on the site. I pretty much have to pick the images I think are the best of the best. If I went to a paid account I'd no longer be limited but my hobby wouldn't be as cheap to pursue as it is presently.

Here's Susan. I thought I did well with the framing in this image.

I was trying to get Susan in the act of her stick connecting with the cue ball. With the shutter lag it ended up a little late though she had gotten the ball in the pocket she wanted to. I think the cue ball also went in though I can't remember. Still, the result was rather decent. 

A couple of hours from now Susan will be in the second day of competitions. There were two complete sets yesterday. Apparently her team did well enough to continue into today which is cool.
Have a great day and try to enjoy life a bit.