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I was looking through the pictures I’ve taken the last week and I had a series of shots of Sarah Lynn sliding down an inflatable bounce slide at the pre-game festivities at Texas A&M.  I figured I would try out the “Create a Collage” option in Picasa.  Although my first attempt did lock up the program, my second proved to go much better.  I really like the resize and rotation feature for the images.  Using the mass of images technique, you can drag the images around and resize/rotate them individually.  An image can be set as the background or you can choose a color.  The color dropper tool will let you choose colors from your images which is really nice (well though out, there).  I made my collage image at an 8×10 size but you there are a lot of options, including widescreen monitor.  So, without further ado, here is my collage (click the image for a larger size).

Last Friday, Liz and I took the kids out to eat at Joe’s off SH 21 in Wixon Valley.  Good place to grab a burger and fries.  Burgers only come in one size and it’s that good,manly burger that leaves your fingers slick from the grease.  I highly recommend you stop by if you happen to be in the area.

Anyway, we left there was a spectacular sunset happening.  There had been rain earlier in the day and the clouds were clearing out.  The colors were just spectacular.  When we got home, I quickly got out my camera a tripod and started taking pictures.  I don’t have the best view from the driveway of course.  No mountain landscapes or beaches to compliment the light.  I did want to capture that light though.

This was the first image I shot and I should have been paying more attention.  It was a 10 second exposure at IS0 100.

Since the clouds were clearing, I went back out later that evening to take some pictures of the stars.  Now, I do live in town, so there is a lot of background lighting.  I really need to head out Tabor or Normangee and set myself up in a field.  I had the camera tethered to Liz’s laptop and I was using Canon’s supplied software to operate the camera.  It was pretty cool really.  I could change all the camera settings and trip the shutter via the laptop.  The software includes and intervalometer so I could set a specific exposure time on the bulb setting.  A little bulky compared to having a wired remote, but it worked quite well.  The sync cable supplied with the 40D is quite long.

I tried variations with low ISO and long exposures and high ISO and short exposures.  The noise generated at 800 ISO is very noticeable but there are other ways to subtract that.  The quality at 100 ISO is very good, even at longer exposures.  Unfortunately, longer exposure mean star trails.

The rest of the worthwhile images are up in the Random Images tab.

We (Liz, myself, the children) were invited to the last summer ice skating exhibition at the Arctic Wolf Ice Center.  Never one to miss a chance to play photographer, I took along my camera, long lens, and tripod and attempted to capture the action.  I set up my tripod using just one leg (can you say monopod?) and felt like one of those sideline photographers at football games.  I probably snapped off around 350 images.  I actually filled up one of my CF cards and had to switch out.  That’s a first for me.  Thank goodness I don’t shoot with film.  Last time I bought film, it was around $6 for a 36 exposure roll.  Add in developing at $0.34 a photo and the cost just skyrockets.  We’re talking around $180 dollars, just to throw out the ones that don’t look good.  Granted, the professionals only developed the negatives first.  Prints came later.  Anyway, I culled through and have put together the best of the what I shot.

I was at a slight disadvantage as the exhibition was judges and the skaters started facing the judges and their routines were designed more for the judges view.  Also, there seemed to be an issue with humidity and the glass wall around the rink was really fogged.

I really liked skater in the fluorescent green.  She was skating to one of the songs from the Tinkerbell movie and it actually took me a few minutes to put 2 and 2 together and realize she was Tinkerbell.  The young man danced to theme music from several James Bond movies and really pulled it off with the bow tie.  The skater in the pink costume was dancing to “I Dream of Jeanie“.  I wasn’t as thick with that one and got it right at the off.  The skill levels of the skaters ran from around Basic 4 (if I recall) all the way to the Free Skate levels.  It was interesting to see that the age of the skater didn’t have much bearing on the skating level.  Some of the youngest skaters were actually some of the best of the exhibition.

Now all I need to do is convince the Figure Skating Director to let me photograph from the judges area.

I’ve been reading a growing collection of photography related blogs and instruction websites and I’ve seen several people capture images of balloons bursting and water drops.  I’ve been wanting to try my hand at this sort of thing for a while and last night, I set up a tray in the sink, turned down the lights and shot about 130 images.  I’ve put together the collection of the best.  I used some plastic CD covers as color filters on the flash to see the effect.  The CD covers were blue, purple, orange, red, and green.  I like the soft green.  The red was a little to pink and the orange was really orange.

I used my 100-300mm lens at 300mm. I started at an aperture of F4.0 which is a rather tight DOF so I opened up to F6.3 later on. I kept the shutter speed at 1/250 for most of the photos. I did play with a faster speed, but couldn’t really see much difference. I still need to understand how the flash settings work, so I’m sure I can do things differently. I set the flash to E-TTL and manually zoomed to it’s max of 105mm. Some of the images are crops to focus on the splash while others are just resized.  The hardest part was timing.  I has several images of the water in the dish without any splash.

Sometimes you can be too relaxed in the bath tub.  She was also singing to herself.