My wife and I decided to take a walk along Percival Landing last night after dinner.  I really didn’t want to carry a big dslr with me, so I grabbed my Lumix LX-3 point and shoot that I carry in my Tacoma with me.  We were treated to a very peaceful sunset along the water and goes to show that you don’t always need a big dslr to make a nice image.

Part of moving to a new town is scouting out shooting locations.  I am fortunate that I have spent a good amount of time in the Olympia area prior to moving here, that is one of the reasons we picked Olympia to be our new home.

One of the places I discovered this weekend while out scouting locations was Overlook Park in Tumwater, WA.  I spent a little time up there yesterday afternoon with my D7000 and my Sigma 50-500 lens.  The view of Mt. Rainier from this part is spectacular, however it was a somewhat hazy day.  There is also a great view of the port that might lead to an interesting time lapse video. There is also a great perspective of the capital building that I had not seen before.  I have shot the capital building a number of times, but always from the other side and from a much lower vantage point.

I hope you enjoy this image, and there will be a lot more coming from this little park with the amazing views.

Many know that I really enjoy IR photography.  The weather was spectacular after work yesterday so I decided to grab the IR D200 and head down to a local city park.

I typically desaturate my IR images a lot more than this, but I loved the tones that came out in the trees from the super color IR filter in my camera.

I hope you enjoy it, and I am really looking forward to getting the IR camera out more.

Ok, there isn’t anything really special about a branch covered in moss, but when it is your first blog post in nearly 6 weeks, it is a somewhat important image.

As most of my followers know, we just moved from Arizona to Washington State.  This move has taken literally all of our time for the last couple month, there just hasn’t been time to do anything other than move.  For that matter, I took my D7000 out of the bag for the first time since Feb. yesterday.  I was a little surprised that I remembered how to use it, and even more surprised that I remembered how to import images into Lightroom. :-)

This image really is just an ice breaker so to speak.  We are not nearly settled in yet, everything we own is pretty much still in boxes, but I am really looking forward to getting out and starting to shoot again.  It has been way too long.

The 2012 monsoon season is still months away and by the time it does arrive I will be living in Washington State, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t be excited that the first real weather since December is in the Phoenix forecast for this coming Sunday.  While there might not be any lightning, you can always hope.

As for this image, it was from the 2008 monsoon and was captured in Tucson, AZ.  It has always been one of my favorite lightning images and thought I would share it again in hopes of making the weather gods happy this weekend. :-)

It’s no secret that photography has taken a bit of a backseat to many other things lately.  As you know, we are in the process of moving to the Olympia, WA area and that has taken an incredible amount of our free time.  The good news is that we have found a place, made and offer and we are now under contract.  If all goes well we should be closing on our new home in the middle of April.

Since I haven’t had time to get out and do much shooting lately, I thought I would do a “way back machine” image that I made in Olympia, WA back in 2007.  This image was taken from Capitol Blvd. and is of the I-5 / US101 interchange.  This particular image has actually been licensed a number of times, so there is a very outside chance that you have have seen it somewhere other than here before.

Here we go again, almost 2 weeks since my last blog post, but I am happy to say that the last 2 weeks have been very productive for me.

First off, I am now a proud Mac user, even if the image used for this blog post is of the computer that recently failed and left my “high and dry” all this time, and I can’t tell you how pleased I am with this new hardware.  As you know, we are in the process of finding and buying a home, so we have been doing everything possible to save each and every penny, that put a brand new Mac out of my reach, at least until after the move, but I found a really good deal on a late 2009 iMac.  Between my day job, and continuing the house hunting, it has taken me quite awhile to get everything setup and running on the new hardware, but as of this weekend I am pretty much back to 100%.  I will be doing a blog post a little later comparing my workflow experiences between Windows and the new Mac, stay tuned.

The second thing that has been taking all my time lately is the continued house hunting.  Over the last couple weeks we had built a list of about 35 homes that fit our needs to some extent.  We have narrowed that list down to just 20 which we are planning on seeing next weekend.  My wife and I are taking a 3-4 day weekend and flying up to Western Washington for round 2.

All of this leaves me at a point where my cameras have not been getting the love that they so deserve, I have every intention of correctly that as well.  Stay tuned.

First off is we have made an offer on a property in Washington State. The problem is that there are multiple offers which has taken a lot of my attention recently.

Probably the biggest reason though is that my primary PC died a horrible death last week. I haven’t had access to Lightroom or Photoshop for over a week now. All of my data is safe, I have a very robust backup scheme and a new computer is scheduled to be delivered tomorrow. The upside to this is that it has prompted me to finally make the jump to Mac.

Stay tuned and I hope to be up to speed very soon.

As many of you may know, we are moving to Olympia, WA this spring.  We are also in the process of trying to find a place to live in Olympia.  This past weekend I took a couple days off of work and flew into Seattle for a marathon house hunting weekend.  This image was shot during the flight up on Friday morning.

This is of Mt. Rainier, from the east looking towards the sound.  Needless to say, I am really looking forward to having this in my back yard.

During our recent downtown Phoenix photowalk we came across a building that has these amazing curved windows.  My friend Chris Frailey included a shot of the building in his recent blog post about the walk, you can see that post here. The building really does seem “out of time” but what really caught my attention was the reflection of the building in the glass windows of the building across the street, as well as the effect that the alternating colors of glass had on the overall scene.  I decided to turn around and shoot if from that perspective which also goes hand in hand with my goal of shooting more abstracts in 2012.  I hope you enjoy the results.

I have to confess though, I took inspiration from my buddy Mike Olbinski when it came to a title for this post, he has a great series of movie title images, and I thought that Inception would work well for this slightly distorted perspective.