Out of Water || Canon40D/EF28-135@75 | 1/60s | f8 | ISO100 | Handheld

This was one of the images that I submitted in the assigned category “Out of Place” in the competition this month. And I confess, this was not really a picture I loved, but it was the only one I could find that fit in the assigned category.

This one was fish food for the walrus at Sea World in Orlando. Nothing fancy, but for some strange reason a strong smell is recalled when I see this photo .

Night Crawler || Canon40D/EF100 Macro | 1/250s | f8 | ISO400 | Handheld

Another submission for competition that didn’t place. But this was a very interesting spider. One night at my parent’s house, we found this spider out in the front that put up a huge web. My dad and I took some pictures, trying to figure out how close I could get and trying different flash angles, it was a fun experiment.

The next morning I went out to take pictures of the spider with some early morning light and it was gone, web and all. Oh well.

Restrained|| Canon40D/EF28-135@90 | 1/250s | f11 | ISO400 | Handheld

First place! I’m a member of the Wasatch Camera Club and we meet in downtown Salt Lake City once or twice a month.  We also have competitions every couple of months and this past Thursday was one. I submitted this picture and took first place in the advanced open division. I’ll upload the other pictures I submitted also over the next few days (even though they didn’t place).

This image was taken in the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park at Fisherman’s Wharf. They had some very neat old ships that were mostly closed by the time we got there so we didn’t pay the fare to get on (the one remaining open ship). I found this chain very interesting. Particularly I liked the lighting, the texture, and how the webs are intermingled with these strong chains.

Post processing done in lightroom (black and white/vignetting) and photoshop to remove a disctracting string and light spot. Original here, scroll down to Advanced category, and you can also see some of the other winners of the night.

Pyramids || Canon10D/Tokina12-24@12 | 1/125s | f11 | ISO100 | Tripod

This was the first place we came after getting off the airplane, I was amazed at how close it was to Cairo, how the city surrounds the pyramids and how close our hotel was to them.

I learned a lesson about circular polarizing filters and wide angle lenses in this shot. The one I had doesn’t work so well the wider you go, if you go wide (12mm here) it provides some rather deep dark vignetting (the unnatural blue here). If you’re interested, here’s some good info about polarizers.

Update: Ok, ok… so I can’t believe that I double posted an image already. I’ll try to better about that