Today we went to the Museum of Flight in Boeing Field.

It’s a really cool day out and doesn’t cost too much – I’m not sure how they afford to keep the place going actually.  Anyway, I went in, camera in hand with a tripod and started shooting.  It was quite funny actually as there were loads of other photogs and they were giving me dirty looks as their clearly didn’t think they could bring in a tripod.

The museum has a number of exhibit areas, the largest of which is the main hall which is literally full of planes either on the floor or hanging from the ceiling.  One of the cooler (I think) areas is the war plane section.  It’s pretty dark in there so the tripod was a real necessity.  I was capturing images with exposure times of over a minute.

Today’s image is a Goodyear FG-1D Corsair.  It’s really cool with folded up wings and the colors in the room looked fab.

Dinner after the museum was at Claim Jumper where they have kids menu’s with cross word puzzles.  Hence the image below:

So here we are day 1.

As I live in Seattle (well Redmond which is down the road – kind of), I thought I would start the year with a Space Needle shot.

Not much to say here, I dragged the family out of the house (with a visiting niece) and hit down town.  There were too many people there taking pictures so I couldn’t go for a wide shot so this it pretty tight.

Anyway here is the image:

And following the recent post on my updated New Year’s resolution, here is the “Fun” image…

To make the resolution fun, I have decided to post two images a day – yeah I know I’m mad!

The first is a serious attempt at photograph, portraits, landscapes, you know, the usual “stuff”.

The second is a fun image, something people shouldn’t take too seriously.

So what’s the fun image about?

Well for Christmas, Santa brought me three Halo soldier action figures, ok I got them myself but in my defense there was a motive (it’s not like I like playing with toy soldiers or anything!)

The idea is I put these Halo dudes in “funny” situations and take a shot.

Now as I write this I’m actually cringing, as it sound’s really lame, but I have some ideas so let’s see how this pans out.

So to summarize, expect two pictures a day, a serious one, and a fun one.

As a hobbyist photographer I wanted a site where I could upload my images.  I had been posting to sites like Facebook and Google+ and while that was great, there wasn’t an obvious location to go to where you could see all my work.

On top of that a number of friends and contacts (and friends of friends) started asking me if they could order prints.  This was a huge surprise to me, obviously a very pleasant one, but still a surprise.

Not wishing to disappoint, I joined SmugMug and set up a site where some images could be purchased, after adding a small nominal fee to me of course (SmugMug isn’t free and I thought if I could recover my hosting costs that would be good).

So the site went live (in early January).

Being the kind of guy who’s never really happy I wanted to add more functionality to the site and as everyone seems to have their own blog, I thought I’d join the masses and start mine.

Now I’ve thought of having a blog in the past but in reality never had enough to say (those who know me will tell you that’s impossible), but I didn’t feel I would post frequently enough to make it worthwhile.

But late last year (2011) I decided one of my New Year’s resolutions would be to post a picture a day though 2012.  Having never attempted this I didn’t realize how much work it would be.  Initially I thought I’d force myself to take a picture a day and post that, but in reality that’s just not possible. As a result I changed the rules of the resolution (you are allowed to do that right?)

The new rule became;

“I must post an image a day, and that image must have been captured in 2012 and never seen before.”

This was much more realistic, but is still proving to be hard work as I have a full time job (that has nothing to do with photography) and a family that I want to spend time with.  Add to this that fact that I want to post an image I like and am proud of, not just a shot of my office chair or a salt and pepper pot makes this quite time consuming.

So anyway (rambling here), this is my new blog.  I will post links to my image of the day, along with some context around where I took it and anything interesting that happened when I took the shot.  If nothing interesting happened I will make something up 🙂

Let’s see how long I last…