That Tim Guy

I recently took a half-day trip to Magic Wings in S. Deerfield, MA with the whole family. I could probably have easily spent all day photographing all of the different butterflies and flora there. Unfortunately they do not allow any sort of camera pods into the facility and while I understand why (it’s pretty crowded) it just further emphasized that I have unsteady hands. Oh well! I still manage some great pictures and this is what I have so far. All of these were shot using my 35mm Macro lens.

Some are good, some are great, some are meh. I still have a few more…but I’m not sure if they are worthy of posting.

I was near “The Elm City” this past weekend visiting some friends and ventured in to a spot that I’ve known about that always has some fresh burnerz. Every time I go I am truly amazed at the work. This is an excellent spot for automotive photography as well. When I was in college I worked with one of the artists known as REO. The rest of Hi-Crew does amazing work and it always leaves me in awe. They are true masters of rattle can art.

Added: 2/17/2010: A quick google search brought me over to this YouTube Channel with a bunch of work done by Hi-Crew.

I took another adventure with Mike and managed to get a couple of shots I liked. Our original plan was to attempt find and photograph a bald eagle. While we did find one, courtesy his wife (Amy), and managed to photograph it….it only ended up being about 10 pixels or so after zooming in to about 400% on the photo.  So needless to say, I won’t post that picture! A lot of my other pictures ended up looking like snapshots that day or didn’t do anything for me….and won’t make it to the world wide internet. Here are a few that I deemed worth enough.  I think my personal favorite is “Death of a Snowman.”

There are also some shots of a tobacco barn that Mike was very eager to shoot. I would like to return again and set up some proper shots of the interior. I think by this point in the day the cold was finally settling in!

The Leonids Meteor Showers occurred during the wee hours of Tuesday morning. I managed to wake myself up at 3:30am  and went try and actually get a photo of a meteor with Mike. It was very difficult to try and catch them. They were shooting for all over the place even though they were supposed to be in the eastern part of the sky. I didn’t think I had caught any until I was looking through the 90+ photos I took and I saw a faint hint of a streak on one of the photos. Well I thank my lucky stars, I actually caught one! Granted, the photo quality is poor and you can barely see it, but I actually got one.

This shot was facing eastward and as you can tell the sun is starting to poke up. I had to verify that the streak wasn’t an airplane, but luckily I had 2 shots aimed in the same part of the sky and the other one did not have an airplane nor the streak, so this leads me to believe it IS a meteor and is falling in the direction we saw most of them fall.

We made a later attempt that night but saw maybe 2-4 meteors and with 4 sets of eyes. More of that night photography will follow.

Last night I packed up my photography equipment after my graduate class into my car and met up with an old friend. After a quick stop at McD’s to enjoy one of my favorite sandwiches we stopped at open field, setup our tripods and began to see what types of shots we could get with a full moon out.  After exhausting the area (and getting frustrated with my inability to manually focus the camera in the dark) we went over to the university’s  campus and walked around taking photos of a sodium-vapor light filled environment. I did manage to get a few photos that I deemed worthy (less than 5% of the photos I took). Have a look.

Which isn’t a whole lot. I’m just an amateur and I do this for pure personal satisfaction. I set everything up and then realized…how am I going to take a picture of it all…I need another camera! Then it dawned on me….my cell phone! So pardon the crappy picture, but I took this with my phone (LG enV2).

• Olympus E330 DSLR Camera
• Olympus Digital 14-45mm lens
• Olympus Digital 40-150mm lens
• Olympus Digital 35mm Macro lens
• 2 lens hoods
• Fotodiox adapter to adapt old OM 35mm lenses — I no longer have these lenses or the OM-1 body
• Olympus FL-36R Electronic Flash
• Sunpak UV filter
• Sunpak Circular Polarizer filter
• Quantaray Cross Screen filter
• Quantaray Cross 6x filter
• Quantaray Diffuser filter
• Quantaray Fogg filter
• Sunpak 6060XL Tripod
• Extra battery
• 1gb CompactFlash memory card
• 2gb Olympus xD memory card
• Olympus FE-360 (Point & Shoot Camera)
• 1gb MicroSD card with Olympus xD adapter (not pictured)
• Canon ZR 500 MiniDV camcorder
• Plus all the necessary chargers, cables, adapters, etc. not pictured.