Travel blog...

If you haven't noticed Jacki started a travel blog. The kick off for her Friday travel blog is from a place close to home. Be sure to check it out...


Click here or on the picture to be transported to Skyline Drive and the Shenandoah National Park.

Outsmarted...

As any good dad I am trying to read to Emma each night and sometimes you come across books that will teach good things.

So as I am reading princess manners (a Disney book) and come to the part where Cinderella cleans up her crafts before starting a new craft I thought that I was really clever :-)

Before reading it I scan the page and make a slight change to it. "Cinderella is good at cleaning up all her toys before getting out a new toy to play with...". Bear in mind that the book ends with "this is how princesses are. Wouldn't YOU like to be a princess???".

So you can see I am thinking this is a really good point since I know Emma wants to be a princess and they clean up their toys before getting a new out :-)

Emma's response though... "Yeah, I'm still working on that!!!". No kidding. That is exactly what she said... I wasn't quick enough to hmm "handle" that one...

Time lapse

As some may have seen I have experimented a little bit with time lapse. Once looking into it I have been trying to find info to what others do.

On Vimeo there are several beyond great examples. Find time lapse on Vimeo here.

On that is a wee bit long but includes mountains, clouds, traffic, northern light and... yeah a lot of cool stuff all in HD is this one.


Pixel's Revenge timelapse demo reel from ridindave on Vimeo.

Just tooo cool :-)

A few portraits

So over the weekend I made a stack of portraits for Lily and her acting portfolio.
For these portraits I didn't use photoshop at all... I used nothing but lightroom and portrait professional and I think it turned out pretty ok ;-)

You can find a few examples and workflow description on my photo blog

End the week the fun way...

Browsing through photos here and there sometimes I stumble on some pretty hmm different things.

Remember back when UFO's was the big topic? Back with the crop circles and all the UFO spotting here, there and everywhere?

One web site hosting some photos is the ECETI (Enlightened Contact with ExtraTerrestial Intelligence).

On the front page they have this photo of "Tensor transmission and probe"



and in the UFO photographs they have a photo of "A Fighter Jet Chases a UFO Near Mt. Adams".



I thought that stuff was looooong gone. If by chance you are interested in buying a photo or two of blurred birds jets chasing UFO's please send me an email. I got a few but only for the ones that are seriously interested (got too much money to spend on nothing).

Happy St. Patrick's Day!!!

As you probably already know st. patrick's day is coming up...
I wonder if the green beer is going to start growing in the garden on time ;-)

New tutorial - enhance and pop color

Last night I finished a new tutorial.
I started creating it based on a photo I manipulated quite some time ago. I kind of forgot how I got the result so it took a little experimenting.

But finally there is a new tutorial available :-)

Enhance and pop color

Whitney this weekend

This weekend Emma and I headed off for Whitney state park to take a walk and look at nature.
It's not one of those super charged state forests with drive by nature and a gift shop. It's "just" a forest with lots of nature.

For reference you can find more information about Whitney state forest here: http://www.stateparks.com/whitney.html.

As we are just getting out of winter (hopefully) the trees doesn't have leaves just yet. So one thing we are doing is walking around trying to find shapes in nature. This is mostly trees that are in funny shapes or look like something else.

First up is our Cinderella castle. It takes a little time but after a while it actually makes sense ;-)



Next was a pile of branches that made it look like a tent so we had to look closer at that to see if there were any animals hiding in there. Not too many today...



We all know how trees look but we found that there are more than one color. Here is a little cheese wood...



Hopefully we will have the birds back pretty soon and starting to build their nests. We checked this bird house but nobody in there just yet. oh yeah I did see the bottom being open so it was safe to let Emma check it. She did check it by sticking her finger in there and nobody bit her so no birds in that one...



What we did find plenty of was different type of fungus. Not the most interesting find in your house but out in nature it can be pretty cool ;-)



This one I didn't let Emma walk up to and stick her finger into. She sure would have but as I told here we are not really sure who lives in there and they might not like getting her finger in their face.



A little more fungus at the end of a log.



With a little imagination here is a snake climbing a tree...



Whitney has a little stream running through it too. We usually go on the main path which has a road that goes over the stream. Going on the small paths Emma took us on today we had to cross it twice... We didn't slip and didn't get wet :-)



This is one of the fantasy animals. One arm a couple of antennas, eyes and a mouth.



Along the path we spotted small red "markers". We started counting but after the first 5 minutes that wasn't fun anymore ;-)



Here is a guy on a swing... obvious right?



Here is the branch swing that Emma and Mom was sitting on last time and we got a photo of them hanging somewhere in the house.



I spotted this thingie in the middle of the woods... haven't got a clue as to what it is though...



Spring must be getting pretty close. There were quite a few butterflies around which I really didn't expect with the snow being here just this past week. But here it is...



Venturing back to the truck we had seen tracks from horse shoes so we knew that some people would ride the horses in the woods. Emma was excited by the thought of it. Then we were lucky enough to actually see horses riding through the woods just before leaving.



ohh yeah and just as we were leaving we saw a couple of big birds. Yep they sure ain't pretty...



As you can see we like heading out to Whitney state forest even though it's "only" 147 acre. It's pretty close to us and it is nice and relaxing just taking a walk.

Colors in nature

Hosted by Cecily and MamaGeek

Ok so it may not be a fresh off the press photo story Friday but I was just going through a few of the "old" photos yesterday and posting them on my website.

Here are a few of the ones I found was interesting in one way or another ;-)

The first one is from one of our walks up to the lower White oak canyon falls. This one I remember mostly because I spotted the red leaves on the tree and it was kind of "sticking out".
The funny part is how Jacki's response was why in the world I would take a photo of red leaves and a couple of months later a very similar photo shows up on the front page of one of the nature photo magazines. That keeps being funny ;-)



Next up is another one from the same location. The stream in the background is coming from the falls but at this place it's just a little stream with a couple of drops along the way. My attempt was to have an interesting background with some colors in the foreground.



And finally from a little pool of still standing water next to the white oak canyon falls is a single red leaf in the water. This is of course interpreted a wee little bit and I dropped all colors but the color in the leaf.



It has been a while since my last visit to the mountains and with house painting, cleaning, moving and all that good stuff it may be a while. In the mean time at least I got a few photos around from previous visits ;-)

Have a great Friday and wonderful weekend...

It may be windy...

At times it can be windy, cold and just the kind of weather you really don't want.

But sometimes I kind of miss that wind and the chill that you can only get from a walk by the ocean...

Doesn't these just say it all? (I guess it helps if you grew up by the ocean too ;-) )

Winter is here...

So we finally got the good snow. The kind that you can actually compact into a snowman and the kind that's great for sledding.

But as it is... of course it had to be on a Monday... And the kids are sick (yeah me running around playing in the snow alone would most likely look a little weird).

It's really one of those days you should stay home with hot cocoa under the blanket but well. How believable is to call to work and say that the Silverado can't make it... not really. In that thing it's like being Dale Earnhardt going 45mph down the highway ;-)

Now I just hope Jacki will find a little time to snap a few snowy pictures since well I'm not there to do it. I am sure they will be coming right up :-)

happy winter time to you all :-)

a tour around the house

Here is a small video with a tour around the house from Saturday.


House tour from Peter Dyrholm on Vimeo.