da Vinci Days Setup

I took somewhere around 2000 photos over the da Vinci Days festival weekend in Corvallis. That is not to say that they are all keepers. A few hundred will be though. I still have many to edit and there will be several more blog posts, I'm sure, with shots from the festival. This shot, I took early in the afternoon on Friday before opening. I was there to grab some shots of the setup, but I loved the look of the banners across the bike path through the park. Stay tuned for much more to follow from da Vinci Days!

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.