paraxialapproximation

WVU Core Arboretum

I had a few spare moments between leaving the Lab and the sun going down, so I decided to stop by the Core Arboretum. The Core Arboretum is a ~90 Acre nature preserve in Morgantown near the WVU Coliseum. According to the University’s web page, it is home to roughly 200 West Virginia native trees and shrubs. I spent a half hour or so wandering around and seeing what I could find that inspired a frame or two. It was getting dark, so I didn’t have much time or much light, but I made do with what I could.

CoreArboretum-6 — The front sign with the Evansdale campus in the background.

CoreArboretum-5 — A few leaves changing out of season.

CoreArboretum-2 — The tree that once was.

CoreArboretum-1 — A leaf. Really it was just some depth of field practice. But it’s a leaf.

Photowalk 1 in the new town.

As you may have read, I recently moved across the country for my PhD studies. What this means for my photography is that I don’t know the area and haven’t had years to spot things that I think would photograph well. I don’t know how good of an excuse this is, because I took a few decent photos in Australia and I really didn’t know anything there, but that’s my story. I’ve had a rough go at getting my photography back up and running with the stresses of moving, starting my new research, etc. But today I had some time off so I decided to go for a little hike. I hiked up to Dorsey’s Knob Park, which is the highest point in Morgantown (I’m not sure of the stipulations on this, whether it’s within the city limits, in the greater Morgantown area, etc, but I digress). I didn’t have much inspiration and didn’t see all that much that caught my eye, but here are a few photos to share.

DorseysKnob-1 — I found it like this; I didn’t ruin half of the paint on this water tower in post!

DorseysKnob-2 — Bus! Though the public transit does suck around here. This is one of three that I’ve seen in the last 2 weeks and I’m not certain where to actually catch them.

DorseysKnob-3 — A little bit of a landscape shot. Substation. Transmission towers. Mountains. I don’t know, just roll with it.

DorseysKnob-4 — Flowers and bokeh(!) what more could I ask for?

MotoAmerica Round 4 at Road America

So, the past few weeks have been very busy. I moved out of my apartment in Milwaukee’s East Side, back to my parents’ house very briefly (much to my chagrin), and have since moved 600 miles further Southeast to Morgantown, WV to start my graduate studies. In my final weekend in Milwaukee, however, a friend of mine and I made the drive up to Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin to watch the MotoAmerica Supersport and Superbike races at Road America. If you’ve never seen a motorcycle race in person, I highly recommend it. It is completely indescribable. The noise. The speed. The beautifully colored riders and bikes. It’s a weekend-long festival dripping in blood, sweat, and motor oil. I took it as an opportunity to test out my new baby, my first L series lens, my Canon 70-200 f4L. It performed wonderfully. The autofocus is wonderfully smooth and fast, even as I was tracking my subjects travelling at high speeds around corners. This was also the first race run by Roger Hayden since the passing of his older brother, The Kentucky Kid, Nicky Hayden. MotoAmerica presented the Hayden family with a Nicky Hayden flag signed by many fans and Roger Hayden rode a lap around the track flying it. The silence was deafening. There were many touching tributes to their fallen brother that day, but the flag presentation was the most beautiful. Sadly, I was unable to capture a photo of Roger Hayden with the flag, but I do have a few of some of the other Hayden family members wearing replicas of Nicky’s helmet and such. Anyways, check out my Flickr feed for the full gallery!

MotoAmericaRound4_2017-4 — Roger Hayden came into this corner a bit hot. Waiting for the pack to pass before reentering the track.

MotoAmericaRound4_2017-18 — The official pace of Elkhart Lake.. Fast!

MotoAmericaRound4_2017-25 — The Marshall.

MotoAmericaRound4_2017-63 — Queuing for the toilet after the Supersport race.

MotoAmericaRound4_2017-93 — Hayden Gillim, younger cousin of Nicky Hayden

Back from a nearly month’s long hiatus

Back and in living color!

Alright folks, it’s been a hectic month. Between the last set of finals of my undergraduate career to graduating (!!!) to moving out of my apartment in the city of Milwaukee that I’ve called home for 4 years, and preparation for my move to the next chapter of my life, I haven’t had much time leftover for blogging.

Anyways, as promised, here is an album from my trip to Australia this time last year. I couldn’t share any of the shots I took while I was out at the jobsite (which is a disappointment because some were stunning), here is a fairly large collection from the rest of my trip. Rather than bore you with an individual writeup on each photo, I’ve included a small caption with each photo. I’m happy to elaborate on any or all of them!

Please forgive the photo quality here, I was shooting with my old 450D, which is useless over ISO 400. I was also appalled at the composition of most of my photos. I’ve grown a lot as a photographer in the past year.

The colorful Perth Underground Station

Astroshot 1

Outback Foliage.

Some American Tractors in Whiteman Park

Astroshot 3

Astroshot 2

Astroshot 4

A beautiful bus!

Astroshot 5

At the jobsite.

The old trolley in Whiteman Park.

Wolfsburg!

Astroshot 7

Astroshot 6

A colorful building in Geraldton.

A beautiful Fastback! I’m a sucker for an aircooled Volkswagen.

More Headlight trails! From King’s Park in Perth.

Some more colorful street art in Fremantle (I think).

Astroshot 8

A boat in Fremantle.

Some Perth street art.

Mother and daughter. King’s Park.

This pleases my inner pen nerd.

Something’s a fowl…

Hong Kong Airport was probably the cleanest airport I’ve ever visited.

Headlight Trails!

I took this photo in Perth on the night of the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida. It was nice to see the support from Down Under.

Small rocks near the Indian Ocean.

Astroshot 9

A talkative dingo.

Pollination

Fanning the feathers in Caversham Wildlife Park

Springtime in Milwaukee

Springtime in Milwaukee is a wonderful thing, after Mother Nature finally makes up her mind and decided to make the weather feel like Spring. It was a nice 55 degrees Fahrenheit in Milwaukee today, with clear blue skies and just a light breeze. It was a perfect day for the opening of the Milwaukee County Beer Gardens! My Fiancé, a close friend, and I rode our bikes (I’m sore, it’s been a long time since I’ve been on 2 wheels) up to Estabrook Park for the grand opening of the Estabrook Beer Garden. This particular beer garden was the first to open in America after the Prohibition. It’s a glorious place, nestled on the hill above the Milwaukee river, with friends and food and neighbors and music. There is one other thing, and it just may be the most important… Beer!

My long awaited liter of Hofbrau’s Maibock was glorious. The atmosphere here was perfect, a band playing polka covers of old Rock ‘n Roll classics set the mood for an evening of dancing, drinking, and photography. To capture the moment, I took a few shots of the defining features, the Bavarian classic checkered blue flags, the sign pointing toward Munich (only 7079 km!), and the beautiful archway leading into the beer garden. I enjoyed my night and hopefully you’ll enjoy my photos.

A late night photowalk

So, story time to go with the photo. I went for coffee with a friend last night; we went to a nice little coffee house in Milwaukee down on Lake Michigan called Colectivo, it’s a local roaster with a shop built into an old flushing pump station (this is a cool rabbit hole to read down, if you’re bored). Anyways, the shop closed, and their parking lot exit only allows you to exit in one direction, which happens to be the wrong direction; towards downtown, rather than toward the East Side. I turned around in my normal place, which is Lagoon Drive that is the main thoroughfare through Veteran’s Park. While turning around, I noticed that the namesake Lagoon had a breathtaking reflection of the city skyline. But I didn’t have my camera. I broke the number one rule: the camera you have is better than the camera you don’t. So I drove my friend home and promptly to my home to grab my gear. When I got back to the park, I looked at the clock and then the Park’s Department employees putting barricades in front of the road. 10:30 PM. Park’s closed. I tucked my tail and went home.

Tonight, I went to a newer brewery in town (Like Minds Brewing, opened October 2016) and tried a few of their brews. I had my mind blown by an imperial IPA named Julia. Seriously, if you’re ever in Milwaukee, go here, drink here, never leave. I also drank some of the best sour beers I’ve had since Asheville, NC. Like Minds. Remember that. Great beer. Milwaukee.

I digress. Long story short, I packed my camera gear in the car (which I was not driving because I was drinking!), and went to the same spot off of Lagoon Drive tonight and took some nice long exposures. This one was taken at ISO 200, 30 seconds at F10 at 50mm with my sexy new Canon 6D. I hope you enjoy looking at it as much as I enjoyed taking it.

Time to dig through some old photos; and Lightroom!

So, I’ve always had a bad habit of shooting a lot of frames and not taking the proper care to sort through them. I’ve invested in an Adobe Creative Cloud (this isn’t sponsored, don’t worry!) account so that I can setup a proper workflow using Adobe Lightroom. I’ve tried other RAW editors in the past, such as RAWTherapee, Pixlr, and Darktable (and a couple of others that weren’t good enough for me to remember, apparently). As I’ve said before, I’m no expert. I’m not a protog (though I wouldn’t turn down a chance if one arose), but even amatuers need a way to sort, prepare, and process their work. Lightroom is, for me, the ultimate tool to accomplish preparation, processing, and sorting. Lightroom allows me to import all of my photos I wish to work with, rate them, flag them, and do very quick adjustments of exposure, saturation, contrast, sharpness, etc. Prom season is upon us and I did a shoot for some family; I was able to sort through 360 frames, narrow them down to roughly 50 shots that were decent, and adjust all of those to perfection in the course of roughly 1.5 hours. It made for an incredibly streamlined experience. Everything ran very well on my Surface Pro 3 (intel i5, 8GB RAM, 256 GB SSD model, so the more powerful of the two i5 options, but not a powerhouse by any stretch).

Anyways, I’ve been working on sorting through some photos I took nearly a year ago when I did some work out in Western Australia. I’ll post some of those soon. Just a forewarning, my photography skill has increased greatly since then, so some of my photos aren’t very high quality. I also wasn’t shooting RAW at the time, and I was still using my nearly-a-decade-old Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi, which is nearly useless over ISO 400.

Rusted and trusted

Since I’ll be moving away from Milwaukee soon, I’m trying to make the most of my time here. I went on a little photowalk in Veteran’s Park this evening and took a few snapshots. This was one of my favorite more “artsy” pieces from today. I present a couple of old rusted cable clamps holding some seawall bumpers in place. Canon 6D (I upgraded!!!) ISO-1600, 105mm, f/4.5, 1/125 sec.

Wisconsin.

No with 50% more breading!

No text needed.

Midwest Horse Fair 2017

Backwoods debauchery.

So, my fiance is a horse person. Not quite one of “those” horse people, but a horse person, nonetheless. So, for the past several years, we have gone to the Mad City to this giant horse event. There are demonstrations, clinics, vendors, etc. We’ve watched it devolve from a focused event on horses with many vendors showcasing saddles and such to a huge mess of vendors selling cheap “country” goods from gaudy purses and shirts to “cowboy” boots and hats. It’s a goat-roper’s wet dream. I took the opportunity to take some photos. My favorite piece from this event was this shot of a blacksmith hard at work.