I actually let someone else do the research on this one. You can find gas cheap in any area of the country. I found it here. She is a stormwatcher and photographer. I suggest if you share those passions you follow her blog. If you want to look for gas, just scroll down and use the widget.
Just a short one today. I have so much backlog of pictures an posts that I need to catch-up on.
I love those moments as a parent where something is unplanned, it just happens and both the parent and the children enjoy it. I try to listen to my children where fun is allowed. As I have gotten older I find that I have less and less just plain-old fun. Not to say that my life isn’t full, but after I turned 40 I find that I just start falling apart. Simple things that I used to do, I don’t do with the reckless abandon of childhood. I have and probably will again hurt myself. I get cautious. On these things I need my children to remind me of what “fun” really is and more importantly how simple it is to have it.
The leaves have started to fall here in Illinois. Our yard has some 6 50-60 yr old Oaks in it. Needless to say I know leaves, they aren’t however friends of mine. About 4-5 times a year I have to rake up a pile that ends up being about 8 ft square and about 4 foot high. I mostly think at the end of this, boy had I been younger I would love to have played in that pile of leaves. Well that day has come. My children had occasion to help me move this pile around the yard. As you can imagine as this pile grows it gets more and more difficult to move it with a rake. Punkin had her rake and she was getting all of the leaves from behind the plants and putting them out into the grassy yard. Buddy wanted to help, with Buddy though, you never quite know what type of help to expect. He can sometimes be more of a distraction than real help. In this case though he had a spark of genius in him.
Since all the rakes were used up he walked into the shed and grabbed the first thing that came to his mind. He brought out the large broom and was going to sweep up the leaves. One can only imagine an 8-yr old boy with a broom trying to move leaves. His first attempt moved them more into the freshly raked yard, making a larger mess. After a chastise from Dad, he got going into the correct direction. For some reason this didn’t work much for him. The broom was discarded after only a few moments of use. He then disappeared into the shed and out he comes with a snow shovel! The old man did not give 
this much more hope than the last genius plan he had concocted. I sold him short though.
He started pushing the leaves into the middle of the yard moving the large pile with some ease. I praised him for his ingenuity and was grateful that his help, was actually helpful. Punkin not wanting to miss an opportunity wanted to trade her rake with Buddy for the shovel. Buddy had nothing to to with this. Buddies attention span is more like that of a 3 year old which is about 3 minutes so after the allotted time he moved on and Punkin scraped up the shovel and went about shoveling the leaves. I will admit to some pride as all of us moved the leaves down towards the house in the back yard.
With all of the hard work done, Punkin an Buddy wanted to play in the leaves. They dove in, buried themselves, threw leaves here an there and generally just loved running and jumping into the pile. Then Punkin wanted me to join in. As some might recall early this summer we all had a running start and jumped into the water at a Wisconsin lake house we had the pleasure to stay at. Well Punkin wanted to re-create this fun, in this case though the old man was worried about falling on the ground and the leaves not breaking his fall. Well guess what, they do. You don’t see pictures of this, but for a 40 year old leaves are just as much fun, if not “funner” when shared with your children. Remind me to stop being such a curmudgeon the next time please.
On to some other details. After my last set of images I had a number of comments about culling and them being OOF (out of focus) I will admit that I struggle to cull my images many times, mostly because of who I share them with. I have many times had an image that I almost through away but, when it is seen through someone elses eyes, it takes on a new light for them than it did for me. That is why I like feedback. In this case and in the Tiny Trains post. I struggle because most of the images are OOF and since in most cases it tells somewhat of a story for relatives, I keep more photos than I would normally because it shows what we did and how it looked. Now what I have on my wall is completely different. What’s on the wall is not what is always online.
The bain of my pictures seems to be focus, I continually forget how fast children move and my own steadying abilities. All of these shots were taken with a flash, but the other thing I am always guilty of is trying to get a very shallow depth of field. I love good bokeh. These pictures suffer from what is in my head and what I can actually produce. Later in the series I got smart. I shot these with an 85mm lens at f2.2 on my S5. Silly. You are not going to get in-focus shots of a moving target even with AF with that tiny of DOF (depth of field) Stop down a few more stops and the background will still be blurred and you will have in-focus children. You think I would learn.
Please comment either her in the blog or on smugmug. Private email will also work.
Thanks for looking!
You can find the gallery here.
The slideshow can be found here.
I have always been fascinated with model railroads. When I was a young child I received as a gift an “N” scale train from
my parents. The track when set-up only ran the train around a small oval. In fact so small I couldn’t even run the engine it at it’s highest speed because when circling with it’s two cars it would fly off the track! Regardless, I must have watched the train go around that circle for hours. Such is the simple fun of my childhood.
My uncle had a model train set. It was a much larger scale. He spent hours and days setting up and fine tuning his track. Like photography is my Hobby, train building and running was his. When we visited, which was quite often, I always loved to go downstairs and have him turn it on. I was fascinated with the world that he created and how much time and car was put into it’s design. Even then when he would take me and my cousin to the hobby store and look at his next purchases how much money a single engine was. I knew nothing of the history of trains. The method of propulsion; electric vs steam vs whatever. I just knew that they were cool! I was never old enough to run his trains, well at least he never trusted me. As I look back I don’t remember them running without a hitch very often either. There was always some breakdown to something that didn’t work right.
My Grandfather had an “H” scale train. His first love was photography, but for a period of time he built and maintained an older “steam” engine on a board enclosed in it’s little world. I and my 15 cousins would have the run of the house. Fascinating and wonderful house it was. He lived and owned the old school house were my mom and her sisters went to school. when they built the multi-room schoolhouse they closed all the one-room school houses down. There was old desks, books, clocks and just about anything you can imagine. In one room, locked upstairs was a train set. One of my cousins was to get it when Grandpa got too old or past away. Nobody got it. It burned down, the train along with 40,000 slides gone.
People who follow this blog know my love for the Botanic Gardens. I go as often as I can. Amongst all the flowers, greenhouses, lakes and rivers is a train exhibit. It changes every year. They usually celebrate the National Parks of the US. Many of those parks I’ve been to, so I get to look at a little tiny version of the park that I have seen the full-scale of and watch train churn it’s way through the countryside. There are volunteers there to discuss most anything you might want to. I believe the size of the Trains are known as “Garden Scale” There big is what I know.
Some of the later pictures taken by my normal VAL are of me in full gear. Some have asked how I carry my equipment when I’m out in the field. I’ve used a number of pieces of equipment on the past, but I have settled with what I started with the Kinesis Gear system. There are a number of pieces an
d you can spot me in them. When you look through the pictures you can see that Kate has captured my better side.
I have already blog about my picture of Buddy earlier. Though I do own a tripod and use it often, I just like grabbing my camera for the most part, framing a shot and keeping in motion. I know and have experienced how much better a picture is with a tripod, but continue to not learn this simple fact. Photographs are better when the camera isn’t moving.
Despite this purchasing the D3 has helped me freeze action. When you can crank that ISO up to 3200 or even 6400 and it is pretty noise free, you can get those shutter speeds up and make your own pictures that much more sharp while hand holding.
The train shots in many I was trying to capture the sense of speed that the trains move around the track. Please let me know if I succeeded. To me they just look like OOF pictures.
As always thanks for looking and please comment either at Smugmug or below in my comments section.
The pictures can be found here.
A slide show of the pictures can be view here.
There are many advantages to my job when it comes to my passion of Photography. I do get to visit scenic places and
I get to drive alot. Though some would not call the driving an advantage. My time is usually also my time before I clock in and when I go to bed. Yes, I am gone far too much from my family and taking flights right now is very difficult, but most any job I know of has trade-offs.
This is one of the better trips I have taken for sight seeing. I have not spent any time in the state of Washington. For me this was a new experience and if given the chance again I will look forward to it. When traveling for work I don’t get the chance to bring my best glass. I don’t have much space in my shoulder bag and frankly with a camera and a laptop that Tenba bag gets heavy!
I had a tentative route through Washington and into Oregon. My route I have some control of, but most of the time it is more a matter of how quickly I can travel to get the work done that I need. I do my research before I head out to a new area and try to line up a number of different areas that might be scenic. I find it works best to have as many areas as possible. I don’t know how long my work will take when I am on site, and so I have found it best to have multiple locations to choose from. Since I am traveling many times hundreds of miles in a day, I also have to be concerned about the weather. There are many occasions I can have great shots that I have to bypass because I don’t have the time to stop and other times I will have too much time, but the weather won’t cooperate. Sometimes there are surprises along the way. Things I missed when doing my research. Seeing these horses from the side of the Interstate was one of them. I have to admit it was a little strange to be on Interstate 90. I have traveled east and west along this interstate many times, it was eventfall to see where the road ends some thousands of miles to the west of where I live. As I glanced up these horses were easily spotted and in most cases I might not have stopped to look at the artistic metal horses charging for the cliff, but since I wanted to capture some photos for my daughter and had a little extra time, I took the short hike up to the view. I’m glad I did! I hope to at some point incorporate my own video into this site, but currently I don’t have a camera that does video. For now You Tube is my friend. This is the video from another family that made the trip to Grandfather Cuts Loose the Ponies.
You can see more of the planned route below.
Nothing like a back roads drive to make things interesting. I can not complain about the sites. The only problem is when it isn’t a photography trip you are a slave to when you travel by. That means there are many shots during the middle of the day or at off hours. 
I found a perfect picture of an old truck, but at 2:00pm it challenges the highest of dynamic ranges. It was even sitting in the correct direction for what could have been a GREAT sunset shot. To my knowledge there aren’t any sunsets in Oregon at 2:00pm! So I shot it during the day. I still thought it made for a good picture. My Photography is impacted many times by images from people I know. I probably wouldn’t have stopped for this picture, but having recently been married and we worked with Dixie Pixel. She was WONDERFUL, though I can’t figure out this post-processing thing she does. Well if you look at her stuff, she likes old trucks. We found one where we were married and well guess what I think I have a thing for them as well.
I did plenty of Panorama’s on this trip and also as you might suspect quite a few HDR’s. Traveling during mid day made it a necessity. Before this trip I had not done alot of experimentation with HDR’s during the mid day. Though not perfect, I kinda like how they came out. I of course converted them in Photomatix. I Photomerged in Photoshop though, much as I wish something else was better.
Since I was on Midwest time and never switched over I did get some nice sunrises. Of course I didn’t make it to sunset on most days. Bad thing about getting up at 3:00am is that by 7:00pm you are pretty much shot.
This was one of my more creative trips and you will see many images processed many different ways. Hope you enjoy the trip through the pictures like I enjoyed driving it! Please comment either directly or below.
