From 2006 - Flowers 01

The next few postings will be of flowers. This was a funeral arrangement when a friend's father passed away. I ended up doing an entire shoot that day with the 3800.

From 2006 - The Woodlands 04

I did manage to bring a tripod, which allowed this night shot in auto mode. The 3800 was used so there wouldn't be white balance problems; the shutter speed was 1/2 second.

From 2006 - The Woodlands 03

This was included in favorites due to the sheer work that went into cloning out the network of wires and cables holding this guy up...

From 2006 - The Woodlands 02

This was taken right underneath the tree in the previous posting.

From 2006 - The Woodlands 01

Though it is hardly fall nowadays, while on 2006 favorites will drag out some autumn pictures taken in The Woodlands. There is a very nice commercial center there; this was taken as we were walking around...

From 2006 - Colorado 16

This was taken from the van as we exited the Rocky Mountain region, on our way back home. Auto Levels really helped make the clouds pop out. As can be seen in the foreground it is a color picture, but might also make a good black-and-white.

From 2006 - Colorado 15

This one a bit grainy because it's zoomed way in...taken with the Fujifilm s7000 at the Denver Zoo.

From 2006 - Colorado 14

...also taken at the Denver Zoo.

From 2006 - Colorado 13

In Denver one day we went to the zoo. I was lucky to get this guy with the 7000, but unlucky in that the focus fell on the leaves instead of the little guy's eyes. Only had partial success in clearing that up with the unsharp mask...

From 2006 - Colorado 12

A few days later, back at Fort Collins, we hiked Horsetooth. In my cubicle this is posted as "Old Man Rock" because of the profile on the right side of the cavity.

From 2006 - Colorado 11

This is another shot at the Garden of the Gods, taken from a moving car in a direction away from the throngs of tourists already there. Only minor cloning was necessary to remove signage and other man-made artifacts.

From 2006 - Colorado 10

While in Colorado we visited the "Garden of the Gods", a place where the rock outcroppings jut towards the sky in sheets of varied hues. It is very near Colorado Springs, where a long-lost cousin lives. It was fortunate to discover a long-lost cousin that lives in Colorado Springs...

From 2006 - Colorado 09

This is a cropped-in shot that was pure luck, as these little critters spasmodically scamper about so fast it's hard to get a focus on the eye, where it should be. The gentle depth-of-field was not intended but turned out nicely.

From 2006 - Colorado 08

This was taken at random as I was waiting for some of the others to catch up. After the first shot I was astounded (and surprised) at the result, so played around with it until getting the composition to my satisfaction. Naturally, by the time all that was done the others had long passed by...

From 2006 - Colorado 07

It took a bit of massaging in Elements to improve the saturation and color contrast in this shot of a tiny meadow alongside the path...

From 2006 - Colorado 06

This is a macro shot that I had to crouch down on a rock to capture, right next to the path. Very unfortunate for the knee but worth it.

Do you see the three aphids?

From 2006 - Colorado 05

This is the second of the two...an important shot in that the frustrations of using just a point-and-shoot really hit home:

• It would have been much better to use a neutral density filter so the shutter speed could be extended to about 1/10th of a second. Even if I had one the Fujifilm s7000 that I was using could not have accommodated it.
• There is a fair amount of color fringe due to the contrast between the mountain and the blue sky. I learned after returning home that that is a function of lens quality. Naturally, with a point-and-shoot there is no option there.
• The dynamic range limitations in the sensor were underscored, as considerable lightening of shadow areas was necessary to keep the shady areas from looking downright black.

All of those considerations, in the moment of the shot and in post-capture afterwards, made me for the first time really wish I had better equipment. From then on my objective was to wait for the right moment to acquire a camera that would mitigate those limitations. Fortunately that moment came last month. Now I'm waiting for "just the right moment" to buy a heftier tripod, a nice flash unit, ....

From 2006 - Colorado 04

This is one of two stream shots captured on the way up to the lake. During post-capture I learned the wonders of using the midtone contrast slider in the Levels dialogue box of Photoshop Elements, as it was needed to keep the rocks from looking too bright.

From 2006 - Colorado 03

After staying in Fort Collins for a few days we drove to Estes and hiked up to Mineral Lake. On that day I shot totally with the 7000, while giving the 3800 to my daughter.

This scene was on the trail. Vistas such as this, plus the fact that there were more streams and lakes to look at, was the reason Emerald Lake was chosen for us as a first hike in the Rockies. It was magnificent.

I didn't think much of this photo until others started commenting on it post-capture. Without realizing it, the rule of thirds was put into play here, with the reflection leading up to the trees, then the mountain. I used the burn tool to darken the curly log in the foreground, as it was fairly blown out. Additionally, the shadows were lightened just a tad so the trees wouldn't look so dark.

I've seen this same scene in several publications since our trip back in '06. Even one of my bosses reminisced about standing in the very spot where this was snapped. Very popular, and it's easy to understand why...

From 2006 - Colorado 02

After a two-day drive, on our very first day in Fort Collins, we went on a walk in the park. This park was full of prairie dogs, which would scamper between the holes of their underground city. There they would remain at the entrance keeping watch, ducking if something ventured too close, which is what had just happened here...

From 2006 - Colorado 01

The next series from 2006 will be of Colorado. Actually, this photo was taken from our van at the base of Capulin Volcano National Monument on our way to Fort Collins. I had my daughter set up for the shot in advance and, slowing to 60 mph, told her when to hit the shutter...

From 2006 - Chinese Dance 05

...curtains!

From 2006 - Chinese Dance 04

The finale...and,

From 2006 - Chinese Dance 03

From 2006 - Chinese Dance 02

One taken from downstairs...

From 2006 - Chinese Dance 01

This next series from 2006 was captured in Stafford at a Chinese dance recital in which my daughter participated. Several pictures have already been posted of this same event some two years previous, using the 3800. That day the wife and I got seats on the third row, which offered a tremendous close-up view. This time, however, we didn't get those seats. So I went upstairs to the balcony with the tripod, taking most but not all from there.

For this shoot I brought the 7000 instead of the 3800, just to see if I'd learned it enough to make the white balance work. There was a bit more post-capture work to correct for white balance, but did end up with some keepers.

From 2006 - Mexico 06

For this and the photo from the previous posting I had to hold the camera against a lamp post. Sure brought some curious looks, but was a fairly good substitute for a tripod.

From 2006 - Mexico 05

This was taken in Saltillo at almost midnight, with the 3800. With that 3800 I could always count on perfect white balance, no matter the lighting. Which makes me wonder...if they could do it on that little bitty model, then why not with the Fujifilm s7000, which was the same maker - or even the Nikon D300s, which is a high-end SLR? Even the reviews for the Nikon counted its lousy white balance in artificial light (especially incandescent) as a "con". However, its saving grace is its ability to correct that deficit by finely tuning the white balance and saving the settings for the next time you have to shoot in similar circumstances. I haven't learned how to do that yet, but have put it on the list as one of the first things to master.
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To continue from yesterday's posting on the topic of Mexico...

Ramón and I connected right away, with him getting used to his new life here in the United States, and me stumbling along in broken Spanish. It was not long before the topic turned to church. The previous semester I had been elected the president of the Lutheran Student Movement, and let my new friend know that one thing I wanted to do during the summer was learn more about the Bible. We made a deal - I would visit his church one Sunday and he would visit my church the next.

Trouble was, I didn't yet have a church; after visiting a couple of Lutheran congregations things weren't falling into place. Thus, I committed to visiting Ramón's church first, which was a small Mexican congregation on Robertson street. Truth be known, I was looking forward to it only because I'd never before been to church in a foreign language.

Fortunately the preacher, Mario de la Garza, was perfectly bilingual. After learning of my desire to study the Bible he started me on the 5-part Jule Miller Bible study series. I diligently followed the lessons and searched the Scriptures through the summer, and on August 15th, 1978 was baptized into Christ. Needless to say, I never go around to holding up my end of the bargain by bringing Ramón to a Lutheran service.

The reason this is all about Mexico is that, after befriending Ramón and many of his family members, I was given a standing invitation to visit his mom and extended family in Mexico. The next summer I had to work to earn more money for college (again at IBP), but the following summer - the summer of 1980 - I decided to take him up on it and arranged to spend about six weeks in his neck of the woods before taking some college classes in Guanajuato.

From 2006 - Mexico 04

Could not resist these angles. Often in Mexico homes are built around a courtyard, with nuclear and extended family members in each one. This cage was affixed to the inside wall of such a compound in Matamoros, Coahuila.

As stated in an earlier posting, the Mexican people are a great people, and it's too bad things are getting out of hand down there. I was going to visit my old home in Charcos (a 14 km drive from Allende, Coahuila) to celebrate the 30th anniversary of my first summer there, but cannot - especially with a family to consider back here in the States. So reluctantly all travel down there is put on hold for now.

But that summer of 1980 was one of the best in my life, a pivotal time that steered me in a direction I've never regretted.

It actually started in the summer of 1978. I'd just finished my first year of college at SFA, and needed to make money to finance the following year. My brother was a lawyer up in Amarillo, fresh out of UT law school, and knew of a place where the hiring was easy with a respectable hourly wage. It was called IBP - Iowa Beef Processors, the largest slaughterhouse in the world.

So I headed up there as soon as the spring semester was over. I didn't own a car at the time, so packed a suitcase plus a box or two and boarded a Greyhound bus...my brother had moved out of Amarillo in the meantime to work here in Houston, but left one of his cars for me to buy (a Rambler American, $150) and made arrangements for a place to stay (a plumbing shop, $90 per month including utilities). Thus, at age 19 I was headed into a town I'd never even visited before, where I knew not a soul, to take a job on the kill floor of a slaughterhouse and live in a corner of a plumbing shop. It was exciting.

After my first day at the slaughterhouse I was in the locker room getting ready to go home, and didn't know where to take my work clothes to be washed for the next day. There was a Mexican fellow about four lockers down from me that looked approachable, so I asked him where they needed to be deposited. It became immediately obvious that he didn't know any English, but I'd taken a couple of years of Spanish in high school and we communicated well enough to get me on my way.

Little did I know that meeting Ramón García would forever change my life, and lead me to what would become my chosen career path as well as a greater spiritual security to this day. The angels were with me that summer of 1978.

From 2006 - Mexico 03

I was on a morning walk in Matamoros when these dogs, taking in some sun after a cool night in the high desert, caught my eye.

The fact that this is in the high desert presented a problem for us at first. When we decided to support a minister in Matamoros, we did not know that there are no fewer than 6 or 7 Matamoroses in the country. For our first planned visit we made arrangements to take a long weekend, with just enough time to make the drive there plus visit and fellowship. Unfortunately, the "there" was assumed to be the Matamoros that most everybody thinks about - the one south of Brownsville. Just a day or two before departure we learned that our destination was not that Matamoros but one in the high desert of Coahuila, much further inland. Because of the greater distance all of our plans were scrapped and we added a day to all future visits to accommodate the longer drive.

From 2006 - Mexico 02

One of the neatest things about Mexico is the colors. Even in the poorest districts the environment is blazing with color, as can be seen here. In Mexico the government - or somebody - will build an entire development cookie-cutter style, then open it up to move-in. Only one or two families had taken up residence here at the time of our visit...