So the other day I was sitting in our family room with Lisa when she pointed out that we had a woodpecker on a tree just outside the window. Now I’m no wildlife photographer so I have no idea what make and model it was but it looked pretty cute so I grabbed the camera.

I got out the Nikon D4 and the 70-200 lens and walked outside to get a picture. I was convinced that as I got closer it would just fly away so stayed back pretty far and started snapping.

The bird didn’t seem to care I was there so I slowly moved closer – again expecting the bird to take flight. But this thing was brazen, it didn’t seem to be bothered at all by me so again I started moving closer.

At about six feet away the bird clearly decided that I was getting a little too close but rather than fly off, it decided to simply move around the tree trunk so it couldn’t see me – or more precisely I couldn’t see it.

I just followed the bird around the tree and continued to shoot away. I have no idea what was so good about this particular tree but it must have been pretty special, as the bird wasn’t going anywhere.

Eventually, I just got board! I’d taken around 200 pictures and decided to go in and see what I had.

I’m told that to really capture wildlife you always need to focus on the eye, so it’s tack sharp, and I was doing this while taking pictures but clearly I’m not very good as a lot of pictures were soft focused. Sure one of the wings or the tail looked great but many didn’t have a sharply focused head – and really that’s what I wanted.

Also I needed to get a picture where the bird wasn’t backed by the tree. Because they were colored pretty similarly if the tree was behind the bird it weakened the composition. Sure you knew the bird was the subject but it didn’t really stand out.

Eventually I found some images where I caught the bird in profile clinging to the tree. I think I actually ended up with around 30 OK images.

The best of which is below.

What I learned from this is that wildlife is definitely NOT for me. I think I got an OK picture but I know I don’t have the patience to do this too often.

For the last two years I’ve had the opportunity to visit Las Vegas for Photoshop World.  This is basically a conference for photographers that provides training and “networking” opportunities with people with similar interests.

I don’t know the ratio’s but I suspect that a vast majority of the attendees are professional photographers – I suspect that most hobbyist’s can’t justify the cost to attend, but it’s really worth it.

Like any big conference there are a number of training courses that follow different “tracks”.  So you can follow the “Graphic Designer” track, or the “Photography” track or “Lighting” track etc., I’m sure you get the idea.  Of course you don’t have to stick to the track you can swap throughout the day.

The training is really fantastic, you can attend a course to learn a new technique or process fix a picture – this is really good if you fancy a new type of genre but don’t know how to start.  For example, I’m mainly a landscape photographer with a bit of portrait thrown in.  If for example I fancied trying weddings or commercial product shooting I could attend a class to find out more.  You can also attend classes that provide you with general inspiration and hear from your favorite professional – those are great too.

Of course there are parties in the evening and dinners you can attend etc., so you can pretty much tie up your whole day from around 8am until midnight.  All the time you are attending with other keen photographers so you learn a LOAD just talking to people.

Another upside (or downside for Lisa) is that there is a product fair there so you can checkout the latest gear and even buy new “stuff”.  But it’s a bit like being a kid in a candy store you can go nuts so I always give myself an allowance and never spend more.

The conference lasts 3 days, and before the conference there is the chance to attend a “pre-conference” event (for some more money of course).

This year in a pre-conference I signed up to learn from Joe McNally.  Now for most of you, you won’t know who Joe is so I’ll give you a few details.  Joe is an internationally acclaimed photographer whose career has spanned 30 years and included assignments in over 50 countries. He has shot cover stories for TIME, Newsweek, Fortune, New York, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and Men’s Journal.  His work is, well, amazing.  Here’s a link to his site if you want to check it out: link.

Anyway, Joe was running a course on portrait photography and I thought why not.  I should say here I had no idea of what to expect.

So it turned out that Joe had arranged for us to shoot performers from the Las Vegas Cirque Du Soleil shows.  It was absolutely fantastic.  There were around 6 different performers and they were all dressed in costume and we got the chance to shoot them really up close for 5 hours.

It was an opportunity I’ll never get again and we had a blast.  I got the chance to learn loads from Joe and capture some amazing pictures.

Here are some of my favorite shots, hopefully you like them too.

If you ever visit my blog, you will know that it’s been a while since I’ve posted a new entry.

The reason for this is that I’ve been a little busy lately 🙂 Work has been manic (well it’s always manic so that’s a terrible excuse) but then I’ve just moved house – probably one of the most stressful thing’s I’ve ever done! Yes I’ve moved before, but for some reason this one took its toll (maybe it’s because I’ve also hit 50 and it hurts more – who knows).

So I’ve been a busy boy. I’m writing this posting on a Sunday night, just after we unpacked our last box, so we are feeling pretty good right now.

Anyway even though I’ve been up to a lot of stuff, I still had time to take the camera out. Back in July (yes it’s been that long) we went to Disney in California for a week. We stayed at the Paradise Pier Hotel and hit the parks each day.

It’s actually been a while since we’ve visited Disneyland, we normally go to Florida, but we decided to go somewhere closer (and cheaper) as we were about to move. Staying in a Disney hotel was fantastic, we could literally walk out of the hotel directly into either Disneyland or Disney California Adventure and of course we were right by Downtown Disney too.

The hotel had a couple of super posh restaurants – too nice for us – so we ate most nights in Downtown Disney. We did get to enjoy the Concierge Service though, which entailed going to this private room each night were we got free drinks and “nibbles”.

The kids had a blast, we went on all the cool rides – thankfully Abi is now old enough to not want to go on the really baby ones and the weather was fantastic.

Most nights found us in “Earl of Sandwich” (James favorite) or Tortilla Jo’s (Lisa’s favorite) where they served the best tableside made Guacamole I’ve ever had.

As a keen photog I of course took my camera, but this time did a little experiment. I’ve been carrying around my D4 DSLR and some heavy glass for a while now. Let me tell you it definitely takes some amazing pictures, but my god it’s heavy! Now I’ve been reading a lot about people getting rid of their expensive DSLRs and replacing them with small mirrorless cameras. So as an experiment I took with me a small Fujifilm x20 compact mirrorless camera. Some day’s I took out the D4, others just the x20. Here’s the question, can you tell which image came from which camera?

Remember the D4 and 28-300mm lens costs $7,000. The x20 cost $400.

Here are some of the pictures from the trip.

I’ve been pretty bad over the last month or two and not posted that much on my blog.  I could tell you that I’ve been super busy at work (which is true) but the reality is I just needed a break.

Having said that the time eventually come around where I really missed going out with the camera and taking some pictures.  This is where I am now and I’m itching to go to the Olympic State Park for a day and see what I can shoot.  But that takes some organization so in the interim I hit Redmond for the Saturday Exotics Car show.

This week was “British Car Week” and there were loads of great cars to see.  To make things even better (or worse depending on your point of view) it was a brilliantly sunny day.  So while it was fun walking around in shorts taking pictures, I wasn’t alone!  Also really direct sunlight in the middle of the day doesn’t produce the most flattering pictures.

But I went for it anyway.

I really love the cars at these events but the people just get in the way.  I’m sure you know what I mean, I get all ready for that awesome shot, position myself at the right angle for a great composition, and some fat old dude and his wife walk in front of me and stop.  Very frustrating.

Anyway I took a LOAD of pictures of both Brit cars and others and decided to post my favorites here today.

In the British section they had everything from old Triumphs, Lotus, Minis, Jaguars, Aston Martins, Morgans, Bentleys and even a couple of McLarens.  They were really beautiful and if I had a spare couple of hundred thousand dollars I know what I’d spend it on.  (Actually that’s crap coz if had that much money lying around Lisa would grab it – but you know what I mean).

Hope you like the pictures.

It’s that time of year again – time to visit the Tulip Festival up in Skagit Valley.   So out came the camera and I set up a road trip with a couple of friends from work (Chris Pearson and Eric Bie).  The plan was to drive up to Mount Vernon to get some tulip shots, then head out to La Conner for lunch, and finally check out Deception Pass for some scenic shots of the bridge and beaches.

Now I’ve been going up to the festival for the last few years so none of this is that new.  Last year I went early April and none of the tulips were out – big disappointment.  So I had to go back towards the end of the month to get the good flower shots.  So this year we decided to wait until the third week of April until we went.  As you would expect this year it was different and the flowers bloomed early.  So we got there today and found a LOAD of empty fields.

There are really two places to go, one is Roozen Gaarde which is run by the Roozen family who have been growing tulips since the 1700’s, the other is Tulip Town where another family (the DeGoede’s) also have a huge history in tulip growing.  Both families stem from Holland which is perceived as the home of the tulip. As the tulips were pretty much gone we hit Tulip Town first and were lucky to find some there.

Now I have hundreds of tulip pictures already, so rather than shoot the same thing over and over again I chose to be a bit picky and just shoot something different.  As it was a little wet early this morning it wasn’t too busy there so we got some nice shots.  Unfortunately though the sky was pretty crappy so most of my shots were low down capturing the flowers.

Anyway we got some great pictures and decided to head out before it started to rain again, so we went back to the car with a ridiculous amount of mud on our shoes (the car is a right state) and drove over to La Conner.  La Conner is a great little town located on the water front just off Skagit Bay.  We found somewhere to eat and grabbed a burger.  Then it was off to Deception Pass.

Deception Pass has this huge bridge that’s really popular for photographers and it’s basically located in a state park.  The park has loads of trails and beaches and we thought it might be nice for some pictures.  The beach we went to had a great view of the bridge and was a beach I hadn’t been to before and I was really pleased with the shots I got.  After that it was time to go home.

We left this morning at 9am and got home around 5pm.  In all I took a pretty low 200 pictures and got less than 20 I really liked (and I would class that as a successful day out).  Some of the shots I liked are below.