Sunrise on the Prairies

Southern Alberta is an amazing place for beautiful skies. I won't lie, I have seen many many more sunsets than sunrises, but sunrises can be absolutely spectacular. Often I complain to myself the pictures with amazing clouds and colour but with only flat fields in the foreground make poor art, but other times it just doesn't matter. Besides… Everyone likes to see some random farm-yard equipment, don't they?

O Little Town of Bethlehem

Tis the Season

Yesterday we finally got out the majority of our Christmas decorations and it is starting to feel a lot like Christmas!

And Winter Came...

Winter is here! It's freezing and often drab, but it is also a very beautiful time of the year! Merry Christmas!

 (Also… Enya has a sweet album called "And Winter Came" -check out "My! My! Time Flies" on it. Very different than typical Enya, but very good!)

Back in the Saddle

I haven't been very active on my blog at all for the last 7 months or so, and honestly I haven't really been taking very many photos either. I recently built a new Hackintosh and migrated 50,000 photos from 3 or 4 hard drives onto my new gigantor 3 TB hard drive. I realized that I will never look through all 50,000 of those photos, so I have started culling them down to the decent ones. I've deleted 5,000 so far simply by deleting the ones that didn't warrant any stars in my rating system when I imported them. 

ANYWAYS, the long short of it is that I discovered a few gems in there and decided to process them and start posting again, even if I don't go out and shoot a ton (tho I am going to get back into that too soon!) Anyways, this is kinda a test post--I'm trying out a new way to blog right from Lightroom. Cheers!

Here's a photo from a few years back:

 

I went to Waterton last weekend for the first time in a few years and it was a perfect day to spend in the mountains!  It was fairly warm and there was virtually no wind.  As we were leaving the park we were greeted with a lovely view of the mountains reflected in the lake.  Just minutes after I stuck my head out of the sunroof and grabbed a set of three brackets to stitch into a pano the wind picked up and the reflection was wiped away.  Click through for super high res! mmmm.

Surfs Up | Pipeline Beach

I went on a week long trip to Hawaii and while I was there I rented a Canon 600mm f/4L from LensRentals.com.  I've always wanted to rent some serious glass, and since I was travelling with my cousin and fellow photographer, and we had some sweet things to shoot (surf season!!!), it was an ideal time.  I took tons of pictures and will be working through them gradually, so prepare for some awesomeness!

This shot was taken just as the sun was setting, looking almost directly to the west.  Despite the difficult conditions I am pretty pleased with how it turned out.  Definitely one of my favorites from the trip.

Wall-E

Testing a new 3D payload kit at ASI

Winter Testing

One last one from last week when I was out taking pictures at Autonomous Solutions Headquarters.  Gorgeous area for sure!

A few more from last week when I was out taking pictures at Autonomous Solutions Headquarters.

Cache Valley Goodnesss

Today I was working on the "Come Work for Us" page over at AutonomousSolutions.com and was trying to find ways to convey to people who perhaps haven't been to Utah or Cache Valley just how gorgeous and cool the area is.  Also, it's pretty unique to have a engineering or electronics job that is located in a place like this.

It was an absolutely breathtaking day with the sun shining super bright and beautiful clouds in the sky, so I decided to head outside with my camera!  Fortunately I had a helicopter standing by to get me up to this height so I could capture this shot of ASI Headquarters!

Sand Castle

Well, now that I am spending all day looking at a computer screen, I really don't have all that much motivation to spend my after-work hours working on photos...  But, I need to do something with photography before I forget how, so here is a shot from Tarifa, Spain.  I built this sand castle.  It's better than yours.

Autonomous Rush

I'm currently in Utah doing an internship at Autonomous Solutions. It is a robotic's company that specializes in automating vehicles of all types. The other day we were down at the airport in Logan doing some high-speed tests of our kit on a Ford F-150. Ford is using the kits on their proving ground test tracks for durability testing (when they drive over huge potholes non-stop for weeks on end etc, they have to switch drivers out every 3 hours or so. With our kits they can drive continuously with no operator...). Anyways, we are supposed to get these up to 80 mph and eventually faster, but the day I shot this we were doing tests at 60 mph.

This is also one of my first attempts at a panning shot that actually came close to working!  It only took about 150 shots to get this (and maybe 2 other ones that are almost as good)...  Now I just need to remember to frame the moving subject with something other than my middle focusing point, so the whole thing will be in the frame!