Saturday, January 16, 2010
Every weekday afternoon, I stand at the corner two doors down from the house where I work waiting for the school bus to show up. Some days I don’t even make it down there before the bus comes, but other days I stand there waiting for 15 minutes or more.
Luckily, Thursday was one of those stand there and wait forever days. When I turned around to say hi to one of the other ladies, I saw beautiful swirly clouds in front of the bright sun and highlighted by the beautiful blue sky.
Since I only walk a handful of steps to the bus stop, I never take my camera. But oh how I wish I would have this day. My phone got a surprisingly good picture, but I know my SLR would have been even better. I guess this is proof that you really should take your camera everywhere. I’m just thankful for whoever decided putting a camera in a phone was a good idea.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Tonight the moon was very large and low in the sky. I took it as a perfect opportunity to use my Christmas present.
Back in October, Matt and I went to the Blue Ridge Parkway to watch the sun rise over the colorful mountain tops. It was extremely cold and the wind was blowing just enough to make being outside of the car’s heat nearly unbearable. Since the skyline was so beautiful, though, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to get a few great shots of us together with the mountains and sky in the background. But there was a problem. We might have seen 10 cars on the Parkway the entire time we were there. So no one was around to take the picture for us.
Being the crafty person I am, I decided to set the camera on the back of my car and set the self timer. And it worked fabulously. We got several great shots of us with gorgeous mountains and sky behind us. But then mother nature blew my camera off the back of the car and made it slam onto the pavement. This did irreparable damage to my camera. And to make matters worse, I couldn’t take any more pictures for the duration of our trip–but we were only about halfway through our planned course.
Since I had been lusting after a dSLR, and Matt had just gotten a pretty nice bonus at work, he let me go ahead and get my Christmas present. A Nikon D40. I’ve pretty much been playing with it non-stop since I got it, which is partially the reason for my absence here. For Christmas I got a telephoto zoom lens and am now able to take far-away shots. Tonight’s moon was perfect. Even though it was too high in the sky to get any landscape with it, I was able to move my camera’s eye past the city light and up into the sky to record tonight’s night light.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Last night Matt and I were debating on whether or not we were even going to go watch fireworks. I threw out a suggestion that we could just watch the fireworks on TV, but Matt shot it down quicker than Dick Cheney shoots his hunting buddies. I went to my trusty friend, Google, and asked if there were any fireworks close for us to enjoy tonight.
Little did either of us know, the little town we live thisclose to has big Fourth festivities every year. It’s quite sad we didn’t know this, since there is some county owned land that they’ve cleverly named Fourth Of July Park. I never claimed we were the sharpest tools in the shed. Anywho, we trekked on over to the park to watch some people blow stuff up.
Where we originally plopped down gave us a perfect view of trees with exploding lights of various colors directly behind them. So, we walked through the park and a small patch of woods and joined some very smart people with an excellent view of the fireworks. I pulled out my camera to try and get some decent pictures of the fireworks.
When we got home, I sat down and looked through the pictures. After seeing their atrocity, I called Matt in to see them as well. I think they further solidified the fact that I need a DSLR with a telephoto lens…and various other accessories. He agreed, so hopefully by the time I get to watch fireworks again I’ll have the proper equipment to come home with amazing photos.
What did you do for the holiday? Did you get to see fireworks?
