Contest win!

Woohoo! I submitted this photo to Lexar Media's Summer Photo Contest and it won!

They're shipping me a 4gb 300x pro CF card for free!
This is perfect timing, as I'll be shooting nothing but sports for the next 8 months, so it should be great.

Action shots

Whew! This is an image-rich blog post.

In no particular order, below are some of the decent action shots that I got from the various water-sports during my vacation.

First off: My dad slaloming on a perfectly calm lake. Check out his reflection in the water!


Next up, some wakeboarding!

My buddy Sean showing me how it's done.
Sean could land some epic jumps, but his dismount at the end of a run was always a spectacular jump and biff, thus he is not holding onto the rope.The epitome of cool.


I can't take credit for these 3 shots (which Sean shot with my rig), but you didn't think I'd go and NOT get on the wakeboard, did you? My epic biff was not directly after this jump (which I landed wonderfully: shot 2), but a couple jumps later.
My epic biff! This fall actually tore out the ball in my captive earring, so I had to buy another earring when I got back home.
We then took turns riding the WaveRunner. I shot from the same boat that we were wakeboarding/waterskiing behind, while the waverunner had fun in our wake.

I really like this silhouette sort of shot.

Sean *ahem* Mark getting it all the way out of the water, although not for very long.

That's that!

Off to pack my stuff for college (yay!) and double check my gear for a couple shoots this afternoon/evening.

Back to our regularly scheduled blogging...

Whew.

Just got back from an awesome family vacation in La Grange, IN.
We have some property on a lake (Oliver Lake, if you're interested) and so we go out there for a week every summer and play in the water and relax.

I shot this on my camera phone whilst sitting and enjoying the view:


And then I took some real pictures with my big camera.

The above shot is actually a pano of 4 images stitched together. At full resolution it stretches some 135" wide, though the lens flare I got is stopping me from printing it...

This is edited a bit in Aperture, just to push the colors where I wanted them to be and get the extreme crop.

This is one of my favorites from the trip... and I can't quite figure out why...

I got a bunch of photos that I'm looking at for use as desktop backgrounds for next month. Also am working on a few shots from my phone that need some post-processing. I'll also post some of the action shots from Indiana (boating/wakeboarding/skiing), as well as some shots from the Ferrari 360 Spider that I'm shooting tomorrow evening.

Lots of fun stuff coming up, so stay tuned (or stick me in your RSS reader by clicking the "subscribe" link at the bottom of the page)

Impending blog lite

The other decent pano that I did a while back. Totally unrelated to today's topic.


I'm going on vacation for the next week or so, so it will likely become blog lite around here.
Fear not though, your patience will be rewarded when I come back and have oodles of great photos to post from Oliver lake in Northern Indiana.

Have a great week!

Macro

Macro photography has never really been my thing. Sure, its cool to get a close up look at something that you don't see too often... i guess, but its usually not my favorite way to shoot.

The other day, I discovered this little bugger hanging out on my window. He had managed to weave his web into the hole in the background, so whenever I opened the window (though it destroyed his web) he could safely retreat inside the hole.
I tried a whole bunch of things before I realized the easiest way to get him would be with a flash.
I grabbed my decrepit Tamron 70-300mm, flipped the focus mode to macro and got as close as I could to him at 300mm. I tried a few flash angles, but the one that worked best was nearly head-on, with the flash sitting on my windowsill :


You can see how tiny the spider really is in this shot... almost nothing to him.

I got a lot of crappy, soft images at first. It took me about 20 minutes to realize i had to stop way down (F/22+) to get anything in any kind of focus. In contrast, I started a F/5.6. I'm sure I learned somewhere, at some point, that I stopping way down is a macro-must... but because i hardly shoot macro, I got to re-learn it.

Overall i'm fairly pleased with the shot. It's a fairly heavy crop of the original, but my lens is nowhere near 1:1, even in macro-focusing-mode so I didn't have much of a choice.

Sepia!

I decided to go out on a limb and try a little sepia-ish toning on a few of the images I took for a client today.
Here's my favorite!

and my second favorite:
Of course, there are a bunch of pictures where you can see his face... but I kinda like these more, and I don't know why. Don't get me wrong, he's cute as can be...


Oh, and here's one of his older brother, also in sepia.


That's it for now.... I'm off to the pool!

Just a little busy...

Holy cow! This was definitely the most productive weekend I've had in a long time.
Lets see... Did a super-cute photoshoot with a family I know from church, updated my for-fun photo site www.mattbeaty.net,
made over 6 dozen Monster Cookies (4-5" cookies w/ oatmeal, peanut butter, M&Ms and chocolate chips),
took some nice panorama photos

finished house-sitting for one friend, started dog/cat sitting for another friend, (no interesting photos there), bought a brand new beautiful mountain bike,
started and finished my DIY R-Strap for the contest by BlackRapid [link: my submission also includes how I made the strap and a video of me using it...]

sat in the back of a car for an hour driving around the hills of way-north-boulder taking pictures of my buddy's Nissan 350z in motion.... I think that's all... The one thing I should have gotten done that I didn't: cleaning my room! I should also start packing sometime soon... going on vacation for a week then promptly leaving for college a day after getting back.

That's my life recently...