Fail

Today was the day my family left for a weeklong trip to New Mexico, and I suddenly had a fever.  Fortunately it was mostly over within two days, but this day was the worst, and I forgot my picture until I woke up sometime around midnight and accidentally took this picture of the inside of my lens cap.

Packing

When the packing starts, my room starts to look even more messy than usual.  I also don't get out of the house for a picture.

Palettes

Piles of old wood are kind of a cop out for some pictures, but I like the way these looked.

Twist

The wind on the rim of the Canyon makes trees grow in some interesting patterns.  I take a lot of photo walks on the rim, but I try not to include too many pictures of the Canyon, since they get old to take and look at.

Tape

I view duct tape as more of a lifestyle than a tool, though it has a surprising number of IT applications that I find exceedingly useful.

Glance

I have no trouble getting my dog to look at me.  It's a real pain to get him to look at a camera though, so I'm always happy when it happens.

Toy

Yet another still of random items in my room... Guess who had other things than photography on his mind tonight?  This toy was a souvenir from a trip to Mexico a few years ago and is a lot harder to master than it looks.

View

Plateau Point is one of my favorite hikes in the Grand Canyon, everything unrolls around you instead of just being laid out in front of you, seeing them all side-on gives you a much better idea of the size and shape of the temples and pinnacles you only see from one angle on the rim.  This picture is at sunrise, I think about 6:40 AM on that particular day.

Crest

I took this on another expedition to get perimeter photos of the El Tovar Hotel for my Google Sketchup project.  Hopefully it will be finished in the next few weeks and the El Tovar will finally be on Google Earth.

Break

I always like watching the sunset down this power line cut west of my house.  It's old enough to be filled in with vegetation mostly, but it still gives a farther view to see the sun and the moon closer to the horizon.  I liked the positioning of the moon in this picture.

Wheelbarrow

This picture looked a lot better in my head.  Especially since I ended up taking it after it was too dark outside to really take a good picture.  That procrastination is something I should really work on.

Grad

This is probably one of the worst pictures I have ever taken.  However, rubber ducks seem to be emerging in my photography project as a theme for both me and my roommate, so I don't feel too bad about this.

Wrap

I made one once about the size of a grapefruit.  I had fun composing this one, but the picture itself has too much ISO noise (the stuff that makes a picture grainy when you turn up the light sensitivity of a digital camera).

Bootloader

I spent most of today geeking out preparing to install a new operating system on my phone and this is the app that does the dirty work (I didn't end up doing it though, it will wait for another day).  For anyone who doesn't know what that means, don't worry, because it's completely unnecessary.

Gold

I'm not really sure what this is supposed to be, some kind of artwork involving gold panning.  I probably would have been good with a little bit more depth of field in this one, the out of focus foreground is a little too distracting, one or two stops smaller aperture probably would have brought it down the few inches I needed.

Zen

I'm thinking I should make a mini-do-it-yourself project out of building a light box to diffuse light for these pictures I am so prone to taking when I get lazy.  This is a mini-zen garden I made a few years ago, about 3"x5".  I'm not sure if I like the extremely narrow depth of field on this or if it is too much.

Keys

Even though I have no Earthly idea how to play it, I like having a piano in the house, just for aesthetics.

Trails

The delay on this picture was mostly because it took a very long time to process.  The picture itself is looking  out over the Canyon from 8 to 9 o'clock PM.  In order to avoid the image noise that comes from long exposures on digital cameras I had to take it as a series of 30 second exposures (f/3.5, ISO 200) which added up to about 100 raw photos that had to be batch edited and stacked.  Not a quick process, and I ended up having to do some further editing to make the Canyon visible at all. It was a lot of work, but this is definitely one of m most interesting effects so far.

Pendulum

This one took a lot of effort, it is a 1/8 second exposure without a tripod (fortunately my lens has image stabilization) to capture the motion of the pendulum, which was less interesting than I had hoped.

Blanket

Hanging on the wall in my bedroom, it was a souvenir from Mexico.  Hanging it in the room improves the room's acoustics drastically.

Cookies

My family has the most awesome cookie jar in the world.  Period.

Side-On

Driving through Flagstaff we noticed a tour of classic cars outside Freddy's Steakburgers.  Naturally, I took pictures.

Axe

Apparently the Arizona Department of Motor Vehicles doesn't think I have enough school spirit, so they had to put "Axe" on my license plate.  Quite the Lumberjack am I.

Work

Some days my job is extremely frustrating, but some days I sit down to fix somebody's computer and look out the window and see the Grand Canyon.  Granted, this is about the only office in the park where that is possible.  This office is upstairs in the Verkamp's Visitor Center and I think it's probably the best in the park.

Model

Sketchup again!  I pretty much spent my entire evening working on this model of the El Tovar Hotel (it's still not finished, but you can keep checking Google Earth for it, it will be up before too long).  I figured a picture of the fruit of my labors would be appropriate.

Path

And it's a social trail...oops.  I walk on this path almost daily either going to work or going for a walk otherwise.  I happened to cross it at sunset on this day.

Snail

Nothing much to say here, just a snail made out of scrap metal.  I think it would be a great hood ornament, but unfortunately it isn't mine.

Creek

This is Oak Creek Canyon.  I took this with a two second exposure, f/29, and a circular polarizing filter.  The aperture and filter were really just to keep the exposure down with such a slow shutter speed, but I am very happy with the smoothed water effect that it created.  After just a small amount of retouching in Photoshop I think that this is one of the best pictures I have taken this year.

Porch

Continuing with this week's apparent Sketchup theme, this is one of the perimeter pictures I took of the El Tovar Hotel.  The lack of composition is that I really just take these pictures to get the shape of the building down so that it is easier to model, but I unfortunately didn't take any other pictures on this day so this is what was left.

Pueblo

This is the Hopi House, a curio shop on the rim of the Canyon.  I was recently building a model of it in Google Sketchup, which will appear soon in Google Earth if anyone's interested.  Modeling the Grand Canyon historic district seems to have become one of my summer projects.