Picture Dump

I'll edit this later, for now I am just getting these pictures in here:

Until then.

Christmas Day and Hence

Another Christmas has come and gone, with few consequences thereof. The world didn't end, the economy didn't fix itself with holiday shopping, and my hair is still ridiculously short.

On Christmas Day my family and I drove 3 1/2 hours south east to Fowler Colorado to see some family. I realized that it has been a long time since I have been down there when it was actually green, and the crops in the fields were tall. (It is a big farming community, if you hadn't already guessed.)

While we were down there, there is a tradition called the "Cousins Walk" where all of the cousins (obviously) go on a walk around the farm trails. It was ridiculously cold (probably around 9 degrees Fahrenheit) so I decided to bring along my D600, to see how it handled the extreme cold.

I couldn't be happier, as it handled it like a champ! No slowing down of the card, no super fast battery drain, the back LCD even worked great!

Here are a few of my pictures from that very cold walk:

 I like how you can see all of the snow sort of shimmering in these two images (though it is harder to see in the upper one). I used a Tiffen 0.9 (3 stop) Neutral Density filter for the whole walk, to that I could have a bit slower shutter speeds than 1/2000.

 Two more sort of random pictures. There is a small stream running through my families farm, with quite a bramble in it, which is the backdrop for most of these pictures.



And here is my brother looking like a boss without a hat at what I could guess was about a 0 degree windchill. Also he is wearing his 3d glasses that we got from seeing "The Hobbit, an Unexpected Journey."

Now that is enough from a few days ago, now I'll say something from today. I went out for a half hour or so walk with my D600 and my tripod, hoping to try some more stuff with my ND filter. So I went back over to the place with the little bridge that I posted pictures of a couple posts again just to see what I could get.

I could pull about a 1/3rd of a second shutter speed through my ND filter, so still not super slow, but enough to get the water flow. It would help if I went back later in the day when there was less light.

I'll leave you with this last picture is one of the behemoth trees in our neighborhood, as we are off to see Les Miserables.

Preow,

Kevin

TV: NCIS
Movie: Les Mis
Game: Castle Crashers on PC
Music: The Heist by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis
Food: Panda Express

Good Lord, am I still alive?

Wow, it has been SO long since I updated this blog. I don't even know where to start with updates. Lets see where my last post left off...

Ok, so after the Coldplay concert I finished up my last couple weeks or so of my internship and went back home for a week to get my drivers license renewed, and I brought my D7000 back with me with all of my lenses. I really do need to get back home to Colorado more often, I really do miss it quite a bit. The landscape if just stellar, so much more interesting than this flat stuff they call land here in Indiana. Even after 3 1/2 years here I still am slightly off-put by the lack of mountains.

Anyways, while I was back home in Fort Collins, the big city arts/music festival was going on, New West Fest, and there were numerous local bands playing at something like 8 different stages across the downtown area.

 This band was quite good, and they had a good gimmick going on with the zombie makeup. Pretty good stuff.

The next day we went hiking up Horsetooth Rock. A few mile hike with a pretty nice view of Long Peak at the top.

  

Also Chipmunk.














A couple days later my brother, my friend, and I went backpacking up the Poudre Canyon. We hiked up about 2 miles with our packs and set up a nice little base camp from which to explore around from.

My brothers SOG tomahawk was getting a bit beat up after spending a couple hours throwing it into a very old very dead tree. Really fun, though, and I was able to nail down 2 and 3 rotations. It lent a nice sense of power sending this heavy piece of metal flying through the air and hearing the "thunk" as it embedded into the tree.
Later we decided to go out on a hike, and literally less than 1/4 of a mile out from our camp we go around some trees and Bam! Moose! And not a little one, a very large Bull Moose. It is unfortunate that I only had my 50mm lens with me, or else I would have gotten some better shots of this majestic beauty.





Later that night we discovered a really awesome effect with an overpowered laser pointer and the fire.

Here are a couple nice result shots.





We tried some long exposure stuff later, but they didn't really turn out from me.

That was basically the end of the camping trip, and we didn't really do much more before heading back to Valparaiso for school.

Intermission:
Not chronological with the telling of this grand yarn, because GoPro just released this, but it is just awesome:

 

Be sure to watch it in 1080p if you can! Just stellar.

Anyways, School started and I got back into my Engineering classes. It is senior year, and it is a bit harder in ways, as the subject matter is a lot more confusing, but I have less homework.

I am taking:
Machine Design
AutomaticControls
Advanced Materials
And Senior Design.

Now, for senior Design I actually am in the greatest project group. We have to develop and build a remote controlled submarine for taking pictures underwater at a depth of up to 100 feet. I'll give more details in some future posts (hopefully).

Anyways, I got a job with my Universities marketing department as a photographer/ photo editor. It is basically one of my dream jobs! I get paid to go to all of the university sporting events and other happenings, as well as I get to use the large nice photo studio down in the basement. Yay 3 point studio lighting!

As "stellar" as our football team is, it is still really fun to go to their games and get nice shots like the two above. These were with my D7000 with my 80-200mm AF. I am getting so much better at timing and framing, and just photography in general. Yeah, I would go out and take some random pictures this summer, but that isn't the same as getting actual experience at an actual event. I'll probably post some more of my better pictures here, too, but I have to get them off the work computer still.

More event pics. I really should get those pictures off the work drive, as I have quite a few all right pictures that I really would like to have up here.














So as a result of all this, I bought my bosses D600. Full Frame beauty! I can definitely tell a huge difference in the Dynamic range and noise performance when compared to my Crop-Sensor APS-C D7000. I am So glad that I made the jump to Full Frame. The camera's performance in general, also, is also in general higher than the D7000.
Here are the specs on Amazon:
Nikon D600
And compare them to the:
Nikon D7000

The only thing that is slightly obnoxious about the D600 is that it seems to gather more dust on the sensor than my D7000, so I have to be more careful about changing lenses. There might be some issue with a slight gap in the shutter, it is something that has been seen in some models, and it might affect mine too. I'm not sure what to do about it, but I can deal with it in the mean time. The image quality is just so stellar that it makes up for it.

Oh, I almost forgot that all of my pictures are somewhere else:
Basketball with the D600
Engineering Building with the D600
Volleyball with the D600
Men's Soccer with the D600
These are all my pictures, they are just on the University Flickr page.  


This is the only picture that I currently have on my home desktop that I took with my D600, so it;ll have to do for now. I spent a couple hours messing with this on Lightroom 4.2 and Photoshop. Also, it is fortunate that lightroom 4.2 supports the D600, even though Photoshop currently doesn't support the .NEF files out of it.
Anyways, Picture.

24.3 Megapixel Full Frame Madness! 30 Megabyte files! Creamy Bokeh goodness! Beautiful.

And I'll leave it at that for today, I'm tired.

Thanks for reading,

Kevin

TV: Friends
Movie: Can't wait for Skyfall on next Friday!
Game: Skyrim, still...
Music: Mumford and Sons and The National
Food: Cheese Quesadilla

The Wedding of the King and Queen of the World

So two of my very good friends got married last weekend.

They are basically the two coolest people in the world, and their wedding was pretty awesome. I think it was probably only my third wedding that I have ever been to.

Anyways, while they did have a professional photographer there, they asked everyone to take pictures with their personal cameras and email them to them afterwards, so it's fortunate that I brought my D7000 (plus my two prime lenses) with me to the reception. I unfortunately only brought my 35mm lens to the actual ceremony. Oh well, it's fine. I took way more pictures during the reception.

Here are a few pictures from the ceremony:

 Fun random collage of pictures, here.

 







I took quite a few more pictures at the reception, though. The Professional Photographer left about halfway through, but there were still some things that were fairly significant that they should have gotten.

Here's a few (or more than a few) shots from the reception:

 Cutting the Cake                                                       First Dance

 Father Daughter dance and Mother Son dance

Artsy shot

 I am very proud of these few shots, while they were dancing.

 The last picture before they headed out.

I had an awesome time, and I figured out a lot about my photography style, too.

Congratulation to Blake and Amy!

Kevin