"Speak softly...

... and carry a big stick"

I wonder if this is what President Roosevelt was talking about carrying.  I guess that organized sports have made great strides in bringing countries closer together, so maybe it is.

A night on ice

My Dad got tickets to the Coyotes game last night and invited me and my boys to go with him. The seats were in a luxury suite and almost on center ice.  They gave us a great view of the ice.

 The jumbo screens were right in front of us which made it easy to watch the replays. 

We have not been to many games, so my boys enjoyed everything from watching the zamboni to watching the players change shifts.

We were staight across from the players benches, so we could watch the players and coaches.

In the last few minutes of the game, the Senators were down by 2 so they pulled their goalie in an attempt to catch up.  That almost backfired as the Coyotes almost scored an empty net goal several times.

We had a great time, and to top it off, the Coyotes were running a special where if they win, everyone in attendence could get a free ticket to another future hockey game.  We waited in line and got tickets for tomorrows game.

Best comment of the night was when my youngest son said "We should come to more games. Hockey is way better than baseball!"  I am a bigger baseball fan, but I enjoy pretty much any sport when I get the chance to watch it in person.  What about you?  What is your favorite sport?  Leave me a comment here or on my Facebook Fan page.

Skills for Triathlon

There are countless blogs and articles online about training for and competing in triathlons.  They will usually focus on how to properly train your body to be ready to handle the race and how to eat a balanced diet leading up to a race.  This is just going to be a pictorial on some of the skills that triathletes eventually need to develop.

Riding one-handed.

This is a skill that is very important to be able to wave to friends and cameras.



Riding one-handed is also very important for the next skill.

Eating.

Riding one-handed is very helpful in order to be able to eat while on the bike. This is especially important for athletes in an Ironman race that will sometimes spend 6-8 hours on the bike while riding the 112 miles that is the bike portion of these endurance races.



Storage.

Packing enough for a long bike ride is always a challenge. You need to have spare tubes and a way to pump them up if you get a flat tire. You will also want some food (fig newtons and gel packs were my choice) and maybe some other things like a rain jacket if there is a chance of rain (not usually a problem for IMAZ) or pain medicine if you are injury-prone. Bike jerseys usually have a couple pockets on the back. These are handy, but it can be a bit tricky to get things out while riding. Some racers get creating when finding places and ways to store things for the ride.



Rules

If you watch (or race) triathlons long enough, you will find out that there are rules and that when you break the rules, you have to make a stop in the Penalty Box. It seemed like things were pretty quiet this year here in Arizona, at least for this penalty box as the tent workers spent a considerable amount of time just standing around watching the race.



So what other skills are needed for triathlons?  After IMAZ last year, I posted another skill that triathletes develop on my triathlon blog.  What else am I missing?  Use the comments here or shoot me an email and I'll make another edition of this skills blog.

Feel free to stop by my sports photography site and see some of my other sports pictures.

Ironman Arizona

Last year in April, I finished my first (and so far only) Ironman race.  I enjoyed the race more than most people can imagine.  Some people that can imagine were out in Tempe this weekend and I was out for a while with my camera to capture some of the excitement.

There seemed to be no end to the smiles.




Even the professional athletes that are racing for money seem to be having fun. Or maybe this one was simply "hamming it up" for the camera.


Some people are more intense than others.


Many spectators wear special shirts to cheer on their friends.  They range from shirts that look professionally done to hand-made shirts that show their creative side like Team Speedy Pants.



Anyway, I had fun out there and I sure missed being in the middle of the action but was happy to be there cheering on the racers. A huge CONGRATULATIONS to all my friends that are now IRONMAN!

Ohhh What a Feeling!

I have been having fun taking pictures of triathletes. It is fun to see the variety of expressions on different people's faces. Some intense, some relaxed and having fun. Still others celebrating as they cross the finish line.

Sharing the joy with family and friends is often a part of the finish line celebration. These heartwarming moments make shooting the finish line pictures very rewarding.


Every once in a while, one of the pictures just jumps off the screen. These are one in a million shots that make photography so much fun. I think this is my favorite triathlon picture since I started shooting triathlons.


What about you? What is your favorite sports picture?

South of the Border - Beach Edition

Finally got a chance to start going through pictures from our weekend getaway to Mexico earlier this month. The boys got to go on a banana boat ride and they had a lot of fun.

While it was nice having an almost private beach, it was sad to see the local economy hurting this much. This guy didn't seem to mind having the place to himself.

He wasn't alone and I got a fair number of bird pictures over the weekend. I played around with some settings on my camera and ended up shooting most of the weekend at ISO 400 which gives a bit grainier pictures than I usually like. I do like the grainy look for some shots, like this little worm creature we saw swimming around in the shallows. We were not sure what they were, but they looked bigger than the swine flu virus and smaller than a snake, so we didn't worry too much about them.

I will be reviewing the rest of my bird pictures soon and will have a South of the Border - Bird Edition out soon. Stay tuned.

Why do race pictures cost so much?

I have heard this question and it is a fair one. I even asked it myself when looking at my own race pictures. You may also wonder why a 4x6 picture is being sold for upwards of $10 when you can take your own pictures into many retailers or upload them on your own and get the same size picture for way under a dollar.

There are many factors that impact the prices race photgraphers set an I thought I would share some of them here to help people understand the prices on race pictures.

One area that greatly impacts prices are the costs involved:

• photographers time. Typically 10 photographer hours shooting for even a short race with only a few hundred
• photographers equipment. High-end cameras and their lenses can run upwords of several thousand dollars
• indexing needs to be done so you can find your pictures. One recent race involved reviewing almost 3000 pictures to identify race numbers and select the best pictures for each competitor. Typically around 10 hours of work or more.
• other expenses like internet hosting company, business insurance, transportation, advertising and more

These costs mean that the last couple races we have shot has brought in an average hourly rate of under $10/hr. Remember, you get what you pay for.

If you compare race pictures taken by friends to ones taken by some professionals, you will often see a difference beyond the improvement in quality that comes with a more advanced camera. You will see that the professional shots will often have a background that highlights the best features of the race area (nice tree lined streets) where the friend snapshots are likely to have cars or crowds in the background. A professional photographer understands how to use the available lighting to maximize the quality of the photograph. Faces in dark shadows or washed out from over done flashes make a less memorable race picture. Furthermore, a professional can edit the final image and bring out the best possible image.

While many times a friends picture of a race will be a nice souvenir, a professional race photograph can be framed and displayed proudly for years to come to celebrate your achievement.

Flowing Desert Photography is proud to try and keep the prices as low as possible, while still being able to be profitable enough to keep professional photographers on the team.

Roses are not always red.

Most people know that red roses signify love and I have purchased more than a few red roses for my wife in the almost 19 years we have been married. A few weeks ago, I saw some roses in the store. I saw some red ones, but the ones that caught my eye were a different color.




I went with these and my wife loved them. They were a unique color and they really had a great shape. They stayed nice for almost a week too which is nice since sometimes the dry air kills flowers within a few days here in the desert.

This was a fun picture to take. I got my 50mm prime lens out of the camera bag and set the aperature to f/1.8 to get a nice shallow depth of field. You can see how the main flower in the picture is in focus and the one behind just kind of fades into the background.

So what do you think? Leaving a comment here is easy and does not require a login. You can also leave me a comment on Twitter. If you like my pictures, it would be great if you would become a fan of the Flowing Desert Fan page.

The Stars at Night...

Last week, the Perseid meteor shower hit its peak as it passed by earth and many stargzers went out to get a look at one of the shooting stars in the night sky. I like my sleep, but since there was supposed to be less, but more colorful "earthgrazers" before 10 or 11pm, I decided to head out with my camera and try my luck.

While I saw several brilliant shooting stars, the camera was aimed the wrong way each time. I did get some nice night pictures of the stars. I don't know a lot about astronomy, but I think this is the big dipper (or is it the little dipper?). I'm sure someone can confirm or correct me.

I think my favorite shot of the night is this one. I used a long exposure and then added a bit of light on the cactus with my LED flashlight. It seems a bit grainy when blown up too big, but as long as I don't blow it up too big, I like it.

My First Photowalk

A few weeks ago a friend reminded me that Scott Kelby's second annual worldwide photowalk was coming up. We decided to sign up for the one in Scottsdale.

It was still over 110*F when our walk stared that evening, but there was still good turnout as we gathered at the fountain. Our walk leader Kim gave some brief instructions for safety and then told us to look for different perspectives. I had aleady decided to start out with my wider-angle lens instead of my zoom. That was an intentional choice to try and experiment with a new perspective for me since I usually leave my 200mm zoom on most of the time.We started wandering along, taking pictures of flowers, walls, reflections in windows. All the things I had not paid much attention to even though I had worked in the area several years before. I took the oportunity to take a self-portrait using a store window reflection.


I even did some window-shopping and found a photographically-themed shirt:
I had noticed a sculpture driving by a few weeks before, but didn't think to ge closer until my friend mentioned there were mirrors on the inside. I think it looks like looking into a giant kaleidascope.

While the image Scottsdale likes to portray is one of affluence and glitter, there will always be those that choose to put their own stamp on things with graffiti.


Then the dust-sorm rolled in. It is hard to capture the mood of a storm like his, but I like how the white of the clock tower contrasts with the brown dust rolling in behind it.


After spending some time chatting with other photographers at the gelato store, we headed back to the car, but stopped to grab some pictures of the fountain where we started. I had to use my tripod otherwise I would have felt it was a waste of energy to carry it around for the whole walk. I like the way this one worked out and may submit this as one of my 2 entries for the contest.


What do you think? Leave me a comment here, shout at me on Twitter, or head over to Facebook and leave me a comment on my Fan Page there. Always looking for more people to become fans on FaceBook, so drop on by.

Technical Notes
These were all shot with my Nikon D60 in RAW/NEF with my little lens (as compared to my 200mm zoom that I usually use). As far as post processing, I did some cropping and straightening and a white balance adjustment on some of them. Otherwise, they are SOOC.

Sports Shooting - Triathlons

Triathlons are hard. I should know, I've done a few (check out my other blog for more) from short Sprint Triathlons all the way up to a full Ironman. When I attended my first race as a spectator with a camera instead of as a competitor, I had a great time cheering on my friends and taking lots of pictures. I got enough compliments on the pictures I took that I decided to do it again at another race. After a few races, I decided to try and get in with an official photographer to get more exposure.

I contacted a Race Director and after some discussion, I became his Race Photographer. This was a huge step for me since now instead of just trying to get pictures of a few friends, my goal was now to get good pictures of every competitor in 3 different disciplines. I knew I could not do it myself, so I proposed a partnership to a friend I had met a few months before at a photography workshop. Paul agreed and we planned our approach to the race. Paul has had kids in swimming, so we decided he would cover the swimming leg of the race and then move over to the finish line.

I would find a good spot to get the bikes and as soon as the last bike was past, I would get most of the runners before they got to the finish line.

Paul got a lot of great shots and I was able to find some pretty good angles for the bike and run portions. It was fun to see so many competitors with big smiles having a great time.

Now after 2 races, Paul and I have a good plan and really work well together. Sales are starting to roll in. Nothing I will be able to retire on, but at least it seems to be paying for the expenses of flyers and gas to get to the races. I am sure that the longer I do this, the more sales will take off.

Take a look at the race photos and let me know what you think. Do you race? What do you like to see in your pictures?

Fireworks Practice

Taking pictures of fireworks is a lot of fun, but can be challenging since there are not a lot of opportunities in most places. I was getting excited for tonight, but wanted a chance to practice some night shots. Mother Nature was kind enough to provide me with a firework show of her own last night. I grabbed my camera and tripod, double checked my settings and opened the patio door.

The lightning was fast and furious and I was able to get a lot of shots with lightning bolts. Here are some of my favorite shots.

In this one, I did a bit more post processing than usual and I kind of like how it turned out. I just played with the recovery slider and a touch of exposure control. The next two were pretty much straight out of the camera. I like the shots of blue branching off on the next one.

I really like the snaking motion on this one. I thought lightning took the shortest route to ground, but this one seems to have gotten a bit confused.

So what do you think? Does this bode well for firework pictures tonight?

Lessons Learned?

I thought I had learned my lesson when I left my camera at home one evening. I said "It's just a few miles to pick up my son." and "It's dark out, so it's not likely to see anything photo-worthy" and left the camera at home. Of course, I saw not one, but 2 Javelinas grazing on the plants and bushes in the neighborhood. And I said I learned my lesson: "You can't take a good picture without your camera."

I have been good about it, bringing my camera whether I am just going out to lunch, or heading up to the lake or looking for a sunset or just going to work. It has paid off. It paid off when I saw the wild horses on my way home from work one day. It paid off a couple times when I saw roadrunners on the way back from visiting my parents. It paid off when there was an accident and I was able to get a neat shot of a helicopter taking off with a line of traffic waiting for the road to clear. Suffice it to say that I have quite a number of pictures that I like that I would not have gotten if I only had my camera when I was "going shooting".

One day last week, I decided to ride the motorcycle to work. I decided that between that and the work bowling party in the afternoon, I would leave the camera at home. The bumpier ride on the motorcycle is probably not the best for the camera and keeping an eye on my DSLR at the bowling alley would be tricky. Since I was also bowling, I would have to juggle bowling and taking pictures and I just decided to take a day off from the camera.

What do you think happened? Yup, on the way in to work, there was about 10 wild horses closer to the road than I have ever seen them. Even worse (for me without my camera) there were at least two cute little colts in the herd. Very frustrating, but wait, it gets worse (or better if you are getting some kind of satisfaction from my pain).

Several miles later I see an airplane in the desert. Not flying as they sometimes do here, but on the ground with at least one person walking around it. I suspect the pilot had to make an emergency landing as this was not a cleared-off area of the desert and they were stopped very close to a tall saguaro cactus (would have a bad thing if they had hit it).

So now I am thinking that I should get a mid-to-high end point and shoot camera. I liked my Canon A95 PowerShot, but it was a bit bulky for all-the-time carry. I might have to look around at some of the littler Nikons like the CoolPics and see if I have been good enough of a Dad this year to deserve a Father's Day present.

Do you have a compacy point-and-shoot camera? If so, which one and how do you like it? Leave me a comment here or yell at me on Twitter or post a comment on my Flowing Desert FanPage on FaceBook.

Get a little bit closer

One thing I like to do with cameras is to always "get a little closer". Some photographers love the wide-angle lens, but unless I need to take a large group picture or a landscape shot, I will usually have my biggest zoom lens mounted on my camera.

Since some of my favorite subjects are wild animals and often a little camera-shy, that usually works out well for me. Sometimes though, a subject captures my attention and I want to get a bit closer, like inches away instead of feet away. My beloved zoom does not handle that request very well. Instead, I will sometimes switch to either my short zoom or my 50mm prime lens. Sometimes that does the trick, but other times, I need to reach into my camera bag for something special. In the case of these tiny flowers, I wanted to capture them on a different scale than I could with just my lenses.


I dug into my bag and came out with a kit of macro filters I had picked up a while ago. I didn't have a lot of time and the breeze was making things a bit challenging since every breath of wind would move the flowers just enough to lose their focus. Still though, I feel like I came away with a few nice shots. I especially like the sharpness in the middle blue flower below. Click on it and let me know what you think here in the comments.


Are you an experienced macro photographer? Please feel free to leave comments with suggestions or resources.

Thanks seems so insuffient...

... and signs like this say it even better.


So, in memory of all who have served or are serving our country in defense of our freedom and freedom of others around the world...Thanks and God bless.

New week, new "Name That Bird"

I will admit that I have been lazy this week. I didn't even reach for the Bird Encyclopedia or even give WhatBird.com a shot yet. Crazy busy weekend. Besides, it is fun to hear what you guys have to say on all these birds I see.

This guy was all over the place, but loud, so he was easy to spot. I think at least one of these might be of a different gender. I liked the yellow color on these birds and how small they were. They were about the size of a hummingbird or slightly larger.

If you pay close attention to such things, you may notice that these are not stored at my usual SmugMug site. I am not real happy with the quality of these, so I am just storing them on my PicasaWeb site for now. There are several other shots there, so please feel free to visit the animal photo album if you want to see some different angles.

So help me out here. What is he? (she?) Comment here or over on Twitter (or both for that matter).

Lessons of a flash

A while ago, I was finally able to buy an external flash for my Nikon D60. If you are not sure why an external flash is a big deal, I'll explain a bit why my new SB-900 flash is an improvement over the built in pop-up flash.

The pop-up flash on my D60 has a few limitations. One is the limited range, subjects that are too far away from the camera will not be lit up enough for a proper exposure.

Another limitation of the built-in flash is the proximity to the lens. This is a major contributor to the "red eye" seen in many pictures.

The last of the major limitations covered here is that the pop-up flash is uni-directional. That is to say it is not able to point in any direction other than straight ahead.

In spite of these limitations, the built-in flash has it's uses. For one, the fact that it is always with you, which is incredibly useful if you need to take pictures in dark or low light conditions.

Another benefit of the pop-up flash is that it can be used to trigger certain remote flashes like the SB-900. This allows you to get better lighting arrangements then you could with the built-in flash alone. With some cameras, that is a simple camera setting to tell the camera's built-in flash that it is a "master" for other "slave" flashes.

The Nikon D60 does not have this setting in the camera which means that the flash needs to understand that it needs to flash when it sees a flash. Sadly this is not a readily apparent setting in the flash. It is there, but it takes some digging to get to it. I will create a blog post (and maybe an Instructable entry) for this as I know there are probably some other D60 owners with an SB-900 flash and are trying to figure out how to do this.

Now is the time for your opinion. Leave a comment here with your thoughts on what topic I should tackle next:
- Step-by-step enabling SB-900 to work with flash control from D60
- Why off-camera flash matters (with samples)
- Enough with the tech talk, show me more animal pictures
- Something else

Fortune cookie said: "Good news...

"... will be brought to you by mail."

Would my Visa bill be surprisingly smaller?
Car loan paid off?
Or would I just have less junk mail to deal with?

So when I got home, I rushed to the mailbox. It was pretty slim pickings. Junk mail from an old college and the electric bill. But there in with those was a bigger envelope of the kind that you use to mail CD's. The return address was a familiar photographers studio name.

It was a CD of photography tutorials. I had attended a workshop presented by David Ziser the previous week and this was a result of that. The CD is packed with some great tutorials. I've already checked a couple of them out and can't wait to make some time to watch the rest.

Anyway, it reminded me that the workshop was great and that I wanted to encourage anyone in the vecinity of any of the remaining sessions should make the time to attend Digital WakeUp Call. I drove 2 hours to attend and would do it again in a heartbeat. It was an incredibly valuable workshop and entertaining as well. I see David is in California this week for a few dates and Louisiana and Texas are next on his schedule, so if you are in any of those areas, hit that link and check it out. (FYI, I get nothing if you go, other than the satisfaction of being able to recommend something I found very beneficial to me.)

So in this case, the fortune cookie was right. Now about those lottery numbers on this fortune cookie...

Site Redesign

While I have done some development work, I am not a web developer or designer. So you may have noticed my main Flowing Desert web page was a bit rough around the edges. I was just getting things started and wanted to get something up. After a critique from a marketing pro, (that I had volunteered for) I started working on a redesign.

A recent fortune cookie said "Put up with small annoyanced to gain great results." Well, learning enough about web development to accomplish this revision (I'm calling it FlowingDesert.com version 2.0) certainly involved more than a few annoyances for me and some were not in the small category. Time will tell if it produces great results.

Stay tuned as I am getting close to releasing some changes. The first change is the new Twitter Icon Archive. I will be making changes to that page first just to test out new stuff with CSS. I look foreword to comments and suggestions.

Honk, Honk!

New week, new Twitter icon. Waterfowl this time around. In fact, we could probably call them IronGeese. You see, I took this picture while I was watching and photographing Ironman Arizona this past November. I made it there for at least part of the day for the third consecutive running of this race.

First in April of 2007, I volunteered on my motorcycle and spent quite a few hours on the course as an official race vehicle. Next, in April of 2008, I attempted to complete the race as a participant. (successfully in about 14.5 hours). This time, I was there to repay some friends that were there to cheer me on who were competing in the new November edition and to try and capture some sports photos.

After a while, all bikes look the same and so I looked around and saw these guys flying overhead. I'm not sure if they were coming or going, but there were sure honking a lot.

I call this one Wingman. "You can be my wingman anytime." (name that move).

The Sun

The sun is the light source that brings us beautiful sunsets (along with smog and other pollution).

We depend on it for our lives. It gives us heat and light. More and more people are using solar power to charge batteries and supply electricity for houses.

But it is a powerful beast that sometimes can cause us problems. Some years ago, there were solar flares that caused some disruption in pager and cell phone services. Now some scientists are reporting that a Powerful Solar Storm Could Shut Down U.S. for Months. A solar storm could cause widespread problems that would be worse the more technically advanced the country. The less involved computers and technology are in a society, the less problems will be caused when they are unavailable. I wonder what impact a solar storm would have on individual solar recharging and power systems.

But while looking at pictures like these, I have to wonder what impact these solar storms would have on photography or if there would be any noticeable change to our visible light. Until the storms heat up, feel free to head over to my photo galleries and take a look at the different pictures I have there.

Where Horses Run Free...

I've been seeing small groups of horses for the past month or so. More than I had seen for about a year or so, but only 6-8 horses at a time. Today, my wife called me in the morning and told me where she had seen a huge group of 20-30 horses really close to the highway. I figured they would be long gone by the time I headed for home in the afternoon.

Sure enough, by the time I was on my way home, I saw a few horses a ways off the road, but only 3 or 4 of them. I stopped to take a few pictures as they were prancing around and kicking up their heels with a bit of horseplay.

Then, I got back in the car and started to merge back into traffic when I glanced a little ways ahead and got a surprise. On the other side of some trees that blocked my view from further back, was another group of horses. I don't know how many horses it takes to become a herd, but I am pretty sure this qualified.

I counted about 24 in this picture alone and I would have had to put my wider angle lens on my D60 to get the others in the picture. Some of them were only 20 feet away from the fence until they saw me get out of the car when they backed off a little. Some of the closer horses kept a close eye on my and the other people that also stopped for a closer look.

It was great to see that big of a herd roaming free. I hope to see them on a regular basis, but I know it will probably only be for awhile before the roam off in search of better grazing. Feel free to take a closer look by clicking any of the pictures for a bigger photo or click the link to see the rest of the wildlife in this gallery. I think there are some good shots there, but I would love your feedback with a comment or a "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" on the photos.

The weather was good for these shots. While it would be nice to have a picturesque blue sky, the overcast sky provided a nice soft light with no troublesome shadows to fight with. Clouds make excellent diffusers.

So what is the most exciting thing you've seen on the way home from work? Leave me a comment here or holler over on Twitter.