This is a winter sunrise from my kitchen window. I am not a morning person. In all of the photos I’ve ever taken this is the first one I’ve ever tagged ’sunrise’, ha ha.

A storm was rolling in today at sunset. I have a feeling it might mean snow, but the clouds were amazing! This panoramic photo doesn’t do them justice. Click here for a larger image.

These are some shots of Park Lake at sunset, taken at the end of Lukas’ Birthday Party. If you want to get a more dramatic sunset, expose for the sky on auto and see what the camera’s settings are. Switch over to manual and use the same settings. Then start taking pictures, raising the shutter speed higher each time. The faster the shutter speed, the darker and sometimes more dramatic the sunset will look. Sometimes you can play with the white balance too. If you set it to fluorescent you can get a magenta boost to your sunset. Try it out and play around until you get what you like. Happy Snapping!

Crazy-L turned five today! We celebrated with a trip to the Corn Maze and a picnic supper at Park Lake. Here is the recipe for the beef on a bun we had. Easy BBQ Beef on a Bun.

Fireworks are beautiful and a lot of fun. A tripod is a must since you will want to keep your shutter open about 2 seconds to capture the full bloom. Set up your camera aimed at the fireworks and start out with a shutter speed of 2 seconds at f8 ISO 200. If you want to keep your shutter open longer to capture more fireworks going off in succession, you can raise your aperture up to f11 or higher to make a smaller hole for the light to come in. Play around and try it out. Happy Snapping!

We went camping in Waterton this weekend. It was B-Cookie’s first camping trip and she was a great baby. I must admit camping with four kids is a lot of work, but we all had a great time. Next time we will definitely stay longer because setting up and packing up are not the funnest parts of the trip.

This is what a Crazy-L looks like as a zombie. If you play Halo at the park and you die, your brother will bury you in playground rocks and you will come back to life like this.

Dude, you’re at the beach. Why are you so angry?

Participated in the Lethbridge geocaching CARL-1 event. Kids had a blast.

Having fun with some new gear.
These were lit with a Nikon SB600 bare from camera right. The trick is gelling the flash to make it look more like sunset. I think I had either a 3/4 or Full CTO (color temperature orange) gel on it. You balance your flash output and your aperture to get the correct exposure for your subject. Once you have done that, you can pretty much move your shutter speed up or down until the ambient looks how you want it. In this case I had a higher shutter speed to make the background and sky darker.