I was adding some feed to bird feeder, when I noticed this piece of ice below the table on my balcony. I snapped an image with an iPhone, and run some filters in Best Camera (you can check out the recipe here). Are you seeing any animal in that? I saw a fish with its mouth up, or a small critter sitting on its back with paws up.

A few weeks ago, we went to see how the water release is going in winter in Coralville Dam. We were looking for slow shutter speed images, I think, but were not very successful in capturing the power of water. However, the pattern of water made for an interesting image. I took some photos with “big camera”, and some with an iPhone. I decided to post-process the iPhone image. The recipe for the image can be viewed on BestCamera site.

Ice fishing is not as popular in Iowa as it is in Minnesota. But there are some fans, and several weekends ago when we were hiking around Coralville Lake and Lake Macbride, we saw some of the tents. When we were coming back towards the end of the day, the fisherman were preparing to leave their positions as well. I found the spot and was waiting for those to to position themselves against the sunset sun for this image.

It almost was no-blog Friday. I want to look through all the images in took in last few weeks and pick up some stock uploads. I checked the blog to see the stats, and here it is – no post scheduled for today! I new it will happen, I am so busy recently, that I am scheduling most of the content on weekends for the following week, and then forget about it until I have time next weekend.
Either way, we took some neighborhood photowalk last Saturday, and this is one of my favorites of the day.

A few weeks ago, we went one evening downtown to get some interesting pictures of the streets for a Digital Photography School weekend challenge. Our assignment image is buried somewhere on page 23, but this one I think I like even more. To get to the final effect, however, I did some playing with Lightroom and Photomatix. It is one-image HDR, custom white balance, and blue graduated neutral density filter on the sky.

We took a short walk around our neighborhood. Overnight, although it was not snowing, I think, the tress got covered in snow, so it was white not only on the ground, but also wherever you looked. Quite beautiful, indeed. This macro Lensbaby shot of the large snow flakes covered rope along snowmobile trail is my favorite of the day.
BTW, interesting tidbit in here, looks like yesterday all states but Hawaii were snow-covered.

We finally managed to get some snowboarding this season, with weekends being mostly too cold so far. It was a great time off everything, just snow and me. But on the lift and when we were packing the car, I grabbed several shots with my iPhone. This is my favorite. We were taking some snaps of sunset with silhouettes of group of people, and we were happy with the results, when this girl came in the picture.

It was a beautiful day, I was off work, I was running errands and just had my iPhone with me. I took a number of images of those berries, all around town, and was so disappointed when I uploaded them on my computer. Side note- I never put an iPhone image on blog before I see it on a big screen. What happened, and what I have not seen on the small screen on the iPhone was how dark the berries came out- there was too much contrast between overcast sky and them. So I took my big camera and retraced my steps, to take the images I wanted!

We took s short walk in the park, just looking for something, anything. There were some red-branched bushes, with drops of water from settling fog. They were so photogenic and hard to photograph at the same time, due to movement from the wind. But from one of the keepers, I made a simple fine art matte. What I enjoy about the image is the drop, the color of the branch, and all the colors of the blurred by the fast lens background of remaining part of the bush.

I was not using my iPhone camera recently too much. As I mentioned before, the noise in low light situations was driving me nuts, and I was hardy ever outside during the day. Really the first occasion came today, when I went to run some errands and saw those beautiful red berries covered with light snow which came out absolutely unexpectedly in the morning. Those below I was able to photograph nicely with my small camera, but it did not work for the large berries on the trees because of the contrast between them and the sky- for those I went home to grab the big camera, and I will post them on some other occasion.