Sunday Morning.. 11/3/2013, After awhile it gets hard trying to make trees look interesting.

I knew that there was going to be cloud cover of some sort coming in from the East this morning, but I didn't know to what extent. I got up in time to make coffee- loaded new batteries in the camera, I even had time to dig out a warmer coat from deep within the mess that lives in my walk-in closet.  so I had my coffee, and locked down the apartment somewhere around 6:00 AM or so, so that left me about forty minutes to get my butt down to Fairview Drive. Halfway there, I noticed that it was getting lighter but there was no sign of any color developing what-so-ever. The whole sky was this dreary looking grey. There was absolutely zero light shining through the cloud cover, I thought I was going to get skunked again so I doubled back and went to the Governor's field bike trail to wait for a little color and get out of this cold breeze that was kicking up. the whole time I was out I got nothing. I came home feeling defeated and wouldn't you know it just as soon as I got here the color showed up. It was way too late to go back out so I played out the hand that was dealt  to me again, I ended up shooting around the wires and the trees across the street from here. I'm learning a tough lesson here, its hard to make tree's look interesting after awhile, luckily for me the ones over here are a bit different than the ones on Fairview. The treetops here have this odd little spiney fingers look to them, still I need to find something other than trees to put in the foreground. ahhh well it is what it is I suppose.

This is one of the more interesting shots I took  from this morning, the tree itself got kind of blurred out and the auto focus trained on the trees in the middle and blurred out the clouds in the background too a little, I left the wires in the shot, I just thought it was somehow better this way.

Morons on Parade. this is pretty sickening,

Sunday Morning Sunrise.

So I got up early this morning, for whatever reason, couldn't sleep heard a noise- whatever, checked weather.com and it said that there would be some cloud cover rolling in just before sunrise at around 6:46 AM this morning. So I threw down a quick cup of joe, grabbed the camera and the bike and headed out for the Lepire Drive bike trail- (which is quickly becoming my  favorite place to shoot from) So I get all the way to the overpass on 5th, and its still kind of this grayish- murky dark color out, thats when I picked up the camera case and discovered that the camera wasn't even in it. nice- way to pay close attention Scratch ol bean! so I hurry back to the  apartment and bolted up stairs and snatched the camera off of the desk where I'd left it, jumped back on the bike and headed back out to Lepire. I got these just before the sun came up, I noticed though that I'm probably going to have to learn to shoot in low lighting with this new Camera if I'm going to continue with my sunrise experiments. I'll go through the manual again this morning and see what it says, some of the images from this batch seem a little grainy to me, maybe its from the the image editor that I'm using but I'm not sure. anyhow I got some ok shots. I'm so ready for the fall!  

Finally Got it!

All of the overtime that I've been putting in for the past two weeks finally paid off yesterday! although that last hour at work deliberately seemed to take its time getting over with, as soon as it did though I got home and hit the shower and immediately afterwards made a beeline to the Carson Nugget to cash my check and then it was off to Office Depot to get the new camera, I went with the Canon  SX 160 IS, with 16 MP's and 16 x optical zoom.. great little camera, and its definitely a step up from the old one. I had to buy a case as well though, the little bugger is a tad too big to fit in the old one, over all, I'm a happy guy!

Finding Heaven

Friday August 29^th 2008. 10:04 PM.

Here lately it seems that I seem to do all of my best, my clearest thinking at night. Maybe I have always had that tendency, but I don’t ever recall noticing it before, but it seems to be the case at least in my recent memory. So, tonight, I find myself in a familiar posture, alone in my dark living room in front of yet another blank screen patiently waiting for my touch to bring it to life. A fan in the window carries a slightly less than warm late summer breeze through my personal space, the faint scent of freshly brewed coffee fills my senses, Its not warm in here, yet strangely not cold either, the mood is perfect for a little reflection. Is Heaven real? Hmmm. Its as good a question as any I suppose, I saw that written somewhere, or perhaps I heard it spoken, I don’t really recall, only that it was recently brought into place somewhere in the back of my mind this week, and it appears to have stayed there until now.

I knew Heaven once, I lived there, somewhere in my early childhood, and on some nights, some like this night, I can close my eyes and see it as plain as day.

There is a wooden floor beneath my bare feet, my small hands clutch the brass doorknob , and it turns freely, I give the door a slight nudge and it swings outward onto a back porch that seems slightly sloped to one side. I step out into the early morning air, the fresh dew, and the grass seems to flow out into the world forever, in an endless sea of beautiful green. There are large trees that stretch up into the sky for miles on end, and on one of the lower branches there is a tire swing that hangs strangely still as if it were waiting for the next ride. And as I step onto the grass the cold dew seeps up and over the tops of my feet giving me a strange sensation.

I’m not sure what it is truthfully, whether or not the world really was a much larger place then than it is now, or if it just seems that way, because I was seeing it through the eyes of a child. It was more magical, there was more wonder, and Heaven was a real place that I lived in, a place that I touched regularly. Now, as I begrudgingly return to the here and now, and that childhood memory slowly fades, I find myself wondering if I will ever see heaven again. oh I am certain that I catch glimpses of it every now and then, but the magic isn’t what it once was, and the open spaces in the world of childhood have become somewhat cramped and closed in. but thankfully the world can still be a place of wonder, You just have to force yourself to stop what you are doing every once in awhile to take part in it.

Yes, I know Heaven to be real, I just don’t live there anymore, I don’t see endless fields of green, and miles of empty clean blue skies, and a lot of the trees have been cut down, to make room for new housing tracks. I am not a child anymore, I don’t see the world the same way as I used to, it is a bit smaller now, and I can see it for what it truly is. I see the bad with the good, and take both as I see fit. Everyone has their own interpretation of Heaven, and certainly to some it remains a myth. The reality for me is simple, I know that I will never be able to again see the world through the eyes of a ten year old child, but that doesn’t mean that I have to stop trying. So on finding Heaven? I guess it all depends on where you look.

A new Camera Coming soon.. (I'm Hoping)

While I was going through my pictures folders the other day I came across some older pics that I took last year that never made it onto a blog post. And then I realized I have only ever shared- (For the most part) – any of my photography on Blogster and occasionally on Facebook but I have rarely posted anything on Blogger in concerns to my photography.   All of the pictures I’ve taken were taken with my little Canon  PowerShot A810, and mostly it is of Nevada Sunrises and (More recently)  sunsets, here lately though the zoom button on the camera has been on the fritz so I will have to be buying a new one soon. I have my choices narrowed down to 2 possibilities  #1- the Canon SX 160 IS with 16x optical zoom and 16 mp’s. #2- The Canon SX 500 IS with 30x zoom and  also has 16 MP’s. Below are some of the pictures that I took last year with my old Canon. The last pic is a little blurry but it came out with a kinda surreal feeling to it so I included it.

One of those WTF moments..

Have you ever seen somebody doing something so ridiculously stupid that actually gave you one of those WTF moments? like one time at Mills Park here in Carson City I was watching a group of kids on skateboards doing all of these fancy Schmancy tricks at the skateboard track, but this one kid  was standing on top of this stone pic nic table and his plan- (I’m guessing) was to jump from one table to another on his skateboard, and they were at least 20 feet apart. I had one of those WTF moments, and I remember thinking, WHAT IN THE HELL IS HE THINKING?? well long story short he missed- (By a country mile) but he did land on the grass so I suspect the only thing that he hurt was his pride.

I see people do bizarre things all the time, and most times I’m left with the thought, “I wonder if this person’s brain is functioning properly?” A few days ago I had such an occasion, one of the machines on our line at work was all out of whack, the molds weren’t dropping onto the line properly. And when they would drop, sometimes  the tray wouldn’t load the sand mold onto the table, and when the next mold came along it would run into the first one and we would end up with a big pile of compressed sand on the loading table with a bunch of mangled cores to clean out.  A big mess to say the least, needless to say as the shift went on the problem only got worse so they finally called maintenance  over to get one of their guys to check out one of  the power panels on the machine to see if one of the censor’s were screwed up.

I swear the first thing this dope did was grab a screw driver and started poking around at shit, and as I was watching this Three Stooge’s routine unfold-  I just couldn’t bring myself to simply look away, I was thinking to myself, “Self? do you suppose he’s going to turn off the main power  to the machine before he starts messing with it?” Nooooo, silly rabbit, that would be too obvious! well I’m not sure what eventually convinced him that messing around with a live electrical circuit was a bad idea but I think it may have had something to do with the sparks that came out of the machine, Now I’m not a mainenance guy,  and I don’t know a doo-hickey from a thing-a-ma-bob, but I do know enough to turn the power off on anything that runs on electricity--- BEFORE  you work on it! well before I left work today that very same machine was doing that very same thing again, only this time the boss was over there with the maintenance guy chewing his ass out for not turning the power off again.  I don’t know what this clown was thinking the first time he pulled this stunt, but obviously he was thinking the very same thing this time too. Or maybe the real problem was, he wasn’t thinking at all.. It was definetely a WTF moment for me.