February 28th, 2009
columbia river . mount hood . mt hood . oregon . the dalles . Travel . vacation
This was another photo from the Oregon Coast trip and series. As I said on the Vacation Grass post, this was taken with my first digital camera. I thought the composition was pretty good on this, for a rookie like me, and that black and white not only diminishes some of the lower resolution issues, but I think really has a nice effect on the photo overall.
February 17th, 2009
photo . photoshop . vacation . wyoming . yelowstone
No, not the Yellow BRICK Road, but rather Yellow STONE Road… This is easily one of my all time personal favorites, for a couple of reasons.
One, I generally like the composition, there is an interesting balance and symmetry with the tree line at the sky and along the road. I also like it given the element of chance – I was driving when I took the photo! The quality is further diminished somewhat, I suppose, since I didn’t bother to hang my head out the window, but just shoot straight ahead out the windshield.
Also, this is no where near the original – of course this was not shot native in black and white – that is post-production. I also photoshopped out two cars, one in the opposite lane coming towards us, and one in our lane just ahead.
I’m pretty sure this is from one of our early family vacation trips up to Idaho. The car in front of us that is no longer there was my in-laws. How fun is that? I kid, I kid! 
I had this one printed and framed, and it hangs in our bedroom for now. This was the photo that keeps me taking pictures – I’m just an amateur like everyone else, but the magic of digital cameras is that you can shoot and shoot until you get something you really like. I like that and while this photo needed a lot of post production work, it was worth it.
Guh… nothing like six more weeks of winter to get you thinking about beaches. THANKS Punxsutawney Phil…
Thinking of beaches, this is a shot I’ve always liked – from the Oregon Coast, which I blogged a little about a few years back. In fact, this shot, or one from the series, is in the template rotation for this site, the photos appearing randomly in the top-right of the page header.
Hmmm… I kind of like the challenge of sticking to a two-word title for photos I post here.
The grasses on the beach were something I hadn’t really seen before – maybe since most beaches I visited in my youth were on the Atlantic coast, but probably more that as a kid, I just didn’t notice the grass. I’m not necessarily the most perceptive type in all circumstances.
This was taken with my Olympus UltraZoom C700UZ, which I loved (and still do) though ultimately it didn’t carry the resolution to really make any photos great. I like how these photos came out, but wish now I had more camera power.
Here are the photo properties for this shot.
I can’t believe it has been over four years since this trip. Time to get back out there.
What is Dad Week you ask? It is basically a vacation – or maybe even a “staycation” (ugh, so pop culture – thanks for that George!)
As a family, we’ve already been on some cool trips this year. Walt Disney World in January and Las Vegas in March for the NASCAR race. For summer fun, the kids have stayed busy with friends around town, local camps and activities, camping, etc…
Sometime earlier in the summer, I suggested that I would take a week off to just be home and do a bunch of fun things with the kids.
One key was to schedule this before the kids go back to school – which is next week!
Then, we had to pick out the things we wanted to do and get them scheduled. With no shortage of ideas to fill up six or seven days, we had to have a process to whittle things down a bit. At work, our development team (and some of our other operations teams) use the Agile process. We use Rally software.
If you are not familiar with the Agile process, in a nutshell, you plan development in ‘iterations’. There is a careful planning process that includes product management or others needing development work brining their “stories”. Stories are requirements or tasks to complete or progress a project. While the Rally software allows this to all be done electronically, our teams have found that using post-it notes helps in the acceptance, scheduling and tracking with our teams. So, long story short, we did this at home.
Each of us created three “stories” – things we wanted to do during Dad Week. One thing could cost money (e.g. the Movies) and two things had to not cost money (or be very minimal in cost). We then sat down and worked together to accepts stories and schedule them throughout the Dad Week days. The kids came up with great suggestions, and we’ve been having a blast. You can see the photo of our Dad Week Board above. Here is some of the list:
And so on… You get the idea. No doubt this is keeping us busy, but we are having a great time. Dad Week is over half way completed. Today we did “Out to Lunch” – Oskar Blues in Lyons, Colorado, and then “Go Hiking” – Heil Valley Ranch near Boulder. We’ve got much more to do the next few days, of course check here for updates. We should have plenty of photos to share too.
I called it Dad Week, but four days into it, it probably should just be called Family Week. Missing work is always less than ideal for me – I love my work – but family and times like these are important – no matter how simple they seem. This has been really great so far and hopefully will be a family tradition from here on out!
Yep, the title and photo pretty much say it all.
When we were in Las Vegas in March for the NASCAR race, we (like many other tourists) found a morning to head south and over to Hoover Dam.
There are a lot of pictures here, some interesting, some not. Here are a few things you should know:
AJ was sick and spent most of the time in the car with Joie, so mostly Jesse and Max in photos. And when you see AJ, well, he doesn’t look great. BTW, he spent 6+ hours in our hotel room thereafter until he felt better – it was a bummer for all, but mostly for him.
Zoom lens. This trip was my first outing with this new camera – my Olympus E-410. I’ve accidentally left the standard lens in a different backpack, so all I had was this higher-powered lens. Close photos were hard to take, if not impossible. Note that Max and Jesse standing in two states at once had to be two photos. (I’ll stitch those together in photoshop, I think to myself. Yeah, right.)
The highway they are building overhead just freaks me out. Those are the tallest concrete support columns I’ve ever seen and although high places don’t freak me out that much, this kind of does. I can’t imagine driving on that highway. They should call it sky highway, at least the way it looks from the current highway down at Hoover dam. Can’t wait to see when they finish it.
So, that’s it – consider this your being trapped at my house and I roll out the slide projector except you don’t have to watch all 88 slides if you don’t want to. If you really want this particular experience, try the slideshow!
Enjoy!
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