A long, 4 day weekend is a lot of time to waste. We decided to spend some of it outdoors, geocaching in Hawkeye Wildlife Management Area, close to our home. It is already that time of the year, when it is cold, but not freezing, the difference between the actual temperature and wind chill is discouraging to go out, and the whole landscape is just… well, brownish. But this view was somehowe interesting, and it made for nice HDR. The only thing bothers me are the trees on the left, which I couldn’t decide if I prefer them left-most cut out or not. I decided to leave it as it is.

Today we finally went to local Antique Car Museum. Old cars have something that makes me stare at them for hours. Probably it’s because back then nobody cared about them being aerodynamic, efficient, economical (not that there is something wrong with it). They were literally dripping chrome. One of the long forgotten details are hood statues. Here is one found on 50′s Cadillac:

Looks like Spiderman, doesn’t t?

I took this image when we were visiting wineries along Iowa Wine Trail a few weeks ago. I love the contrast between dark, almost monochromatic cat and the bright red barn.

We spend yesterday’s meal with some of our friends and colleagues, and although it was a very international group, we had rather traditional meal. With absolutely minimalistic set-up- on camera flash without any modifier ( I had a nice diffuser for on flash camera which I gave away and still did not buy back. Bummer.), I took some decent pictures of our dishes.

Everybody taking photographs took at least once a night photograph of the cars leaving a light trail. But you can do it with airplanes, as well, and the result is not less stunning. Last weekend, we took the camera, and went to local airport around the time of the largest evening traffic. There was maybe 6 planes arriving and one plane taking off (hey, it was Saturday evening, Iowa ), just enough to have time for some trial and error and a keeper. I know now what I want to do different next time, but I still like this best image from that evening.

I started to listen to an interesting podcast last week – SCL: Subject, Composition and Light podcast. It is out there for more then a year now, and is accompanied by a blog. The guy started to work on his photographic skills at the same time I did, Christmas 2007, but certainly has more time and is more focused on what he wants from his photographic experience. It is a very interesting podcast to follow, because, although he claims the podcast is for sharing his experience as beginner photographer, from the first episode he is including a lot of interesting comments and suggestions. He also has a Flickr group, and organizes technical challenges and assignments. One of the first was taking an image as from mouse perspective.
I was looking at this photograph of my cat, Ace, and it crossed my mind it is exactly how a mouse would see him.

We went to our favorite small airport to do some flying yesterday, but the weather was not exactly perfect for cross-country. Not risking getting stuck in middle-of-nowhere, Iowa for undetermined amount of time, we turned around and decided to spend the midday photographic planes rather then flying them. More fun for me, if anybody asks . We saw somewhere around the net the HDR gallery for planes, and wanted to give it a try. Again, we disagreed on the post-processing and artistic concept of the project . Tomasz liked more hard-core HDR, which are a bit too much for me. So I ended up processing resulting 12 Citabria and 19 Cherokee images in two ways, and then finishing them off with two different concepts in mind. But I have to admit, having a lot of time, a lot of point-of-views, made the project so much fun! And why not black-and-white or selective colors? Especially if the yellow plane is competing for attention with yellow grass (man, I really did not notice it until I had final processed images on the screen!). Check it out.

There will be no photography post today. I am finishing off some printing projects, taking images, and working on my blog-web page to reflect the changes in my approach to it.
I am reading on blogs and web pages and listening on podcasts (check some ideas in this podcast and pages suggested in show notes) about photographic blogs, how to design them and run them, at the same time trying to reach out to people and offer them my photography, to start maybe earning some money on that. As a result, I am putting some time today reorganizing a bit my blog, and one of the things you might find useful is the new category organization, with sub categories, and additional categories to make it easier to find different types of images in the archive, rather then going through the monthly archives on this blog. At the same time I am editing every single post to add it to all appropriate categories, which I am sure will take a while. I started from the newest and will work back, so eventually all the post will be categorized. There 368 of them so far!
I am also planning to deviate or abandon completely from the posting theme schedule I started several months ago. It was a mixture of photographic types and techniques (or gear) through the week, and I tended not to post on given day, when I didn’t have an appropriate image, rather then post another image, and I have quite a few worth posting. In this moment, I expect Gallery Monday will stay, as well as iPhone Tuesday, as they make sense for me, but I will probably abandon the rest.
In next few weeks, I am also planning to add few more portfolio galleries, and I am working on possibility to buy prints on this site as well. It will have a form of the gallery with my favorite images, but it is all I know so far.
If you have any comments about the current organization on blog, or what you think I should add, write a comment.
And check out not only new posts, but also what else is happening on the page.

An experiment today. I saw the video tutorial on David Ziser blog last week, and decided to try to apply the effect to a little bit different photo. With the color of bride flowers during the wedding I was shooting, it was much harder to use the technique. But when I looked through the collection of images, my eyes were drawn to the dance on the second day of the wedding, and the bright red elements of clothing of the couple. I used “the spot of color” technique, and certainly liked the effect. It was exactly as I envisioned it.

Yet another image from my recipe book collection I did last months. Or maybe it is more then that, already? I am working on touch up an old photograph for my parents, and I a discovering a local adjustment brush for softening/sharpening in Lightroom, so I used same tricks on this image.