Car Show

On Saturday, the "DARE to Cruise for CASA" car show took place in downtown Albany. I'm not a huge car person, but I do like seeing classic or cool and unusual cars. I dropped in for about an hour or so to check them out and take some pictures. Here is a picture of a Cobra that I liked. The rest of the car show pictures should be up on Flickr soon.

4th of July in Albany

I went downtown to catch the fireworks display on the waterfront in Albany. The area was packed. My plan was to take shots of the fireworks from some distance away on the Ellsworth st. bridge. A number of people were also there to watch the show and a few others with cameras and tripods. I staked out a spot with about 30 minutes to go. I didn't want to carry too much gear out on the bridge so I only brought one lens with me. As it turned out, It wasn't quite wide enough to capture exactly the shot I wanted, but I got close. Most of the exposures are in the 5-6 second range. I used some pseudo HDR techniques to enhance them where possible and I ended up with about 5 shots that I'm pretty happy with. Here is one of them.

Mordor

On our camping trip in Eastern Oregon, we went rock hounding in a place called Succor Creek. With the storm starting to move in that would later threaten our camp site with high winds, the sides of the canyon reminded me of the fictional Mordor from Lord of the Rings.

Sunset on Lake Owyhee

I believe this was the first night of our camping stay on the Owyhee Reservoir. I took several shots of the sunset across the lake and far edge of the canyon. One had a piece of driftwood in the foreground, but the cleaner look of the rocky shore won out. This is an HDR composite of several exposures in Photomatix, but I ended up masking back in the sky and the water from the original shots so much of the merging process was done manually in the end. There is a version of this photo available as a free wallpaper here as well.

The Painted Hills

On our way back from camping at Lake Owyhee last week, we stopped off at the painted hills. They are located in Eastern Oregon near the small town of Mitchell. We were lucky to get a quick break from the rain to enjoy the scenery... for only about 10 minutes. I was climbing up the half mile trail to the main overlook at the top, snapping pictures along the way, when it began hailing and I had to tuck the camera in my jacket and run back to the Jeep. Fortunately it didn't come down too hard and it was actually letting up a little by the time I was able to get inside. I think this might be the last shot I got off before it hit. I didn't venture back out for another attempt.