Here's Blikje enjoying the sunset hour

The past three nights have been exceptional sunsets!

Grendel and Blikje together with visitors!

And evening visitors.

Blikje making sure they pick the correct sign!

Hi John! You at home? Is the coming time change gonna kick your butt? You already get up before the boids!

very nice Rusty. I have to see to the dinner hour now. see you tomorrow.

We're getting the last light of the day here, too. The cardinals are feeding. They nest in the spruces behind our house and are usually the last birds at the feeder tray.

You guys can't go to bed yet, how about a picture of Sue and I from our honeymoon many years ago.



Taken on a beach in Barbados.

Hi Cecil! I'm here and the pix are loading!

Cecil - what a pretty shot of you two kids! Memories! We did our honeymoon in Daytona Beach. What is it about the ocean?

Green Grendel!

we got married on a vacation to Sun Valley, Idaho. So that served as our honeymoon.

Nice shot Cecil.

Another interesting factoid about that picture is that I took it. I believe the Pentax was on a trash can with the self timer. There's a trick to get a sunset picture with someone in the foreground. You use an automatic flash and set the f-stop for the flash and the sunset sets the shutter speed (as long as it's slower than your synth speed). If you let the camera decide you will get siloutes (sp). We'll see how the digital does in the same situation.

Cecil...which trash can will you pick for the set up? LOL. Nice shot of the two of you and interesting set up, too. Picked up my newest digital and it's housing today...new toy time! Carole (Shutterbug)

Here's a sunset picture of me and Tricia taken aboard the Zien in Negril Jamaica a few years back.



Cheers,
Alan

Shutterbug - run out there and click something! Post! Post! Post!

I liked "Great Lover's Day". Lots of nice pics, but we're missing Jake and Linda. I know Cynde doesn't have time to breath, much less post.

That is a great picture Alan, perfect timing.

Carole, what did you get?

Alan - WOW! Looks like a honeymoon (or sun!) picture. Beautiful.

Cecil, this time around it is the Canon S40 digital with up to 4.0 million pixels and the Canon underwater housing that was made for it. The housing reminds me of one of the first artificial heart valves built because of the numerous buttons and gadgets on it...you can operate every single feature on the camera while you are underwater. I just picked it up yesterday. Figured it was too expensive to buy the "unknown" housing for the already existing Fuji Finepix 6800 Zoom I have so this way I have two digitals and one good housing to work with. The Fuji will remain on "land" only at this time. I hope to learn how to use the Canon quickly as we are arriving on Bonaire May 18....so, which trash can will you pick this time?? LOL. Carole (Shutterbug)

Hey, Rusty....I am still trying to figure the new toy out..will have some material by this weekend, hopefully. Weather is not cooperating in NJ at this point, but we do need the rain badly. Carole (Shutterbug)

Wow, Carole nice camera, I just did a quick check on dpreview.com. It's got everything you could want, now all you got to do is learn how to use and fool it. The last is a deep dark secret that engineers don't normally tell mere mortals. Machines are made to be fooled and I spend most of my day figuring out how to fool them. I could give you a million examples (especially fooling software), but Carole has a new camera to snooker.

Carole learn the half trigger press, when you do that the camera sets up the focus and the exposure. Three advantages 1) Reduce your lag time. 2) Get it to focus at a distance other than the center of the picture (focus on one spot pan the camera and take the picture) and 3) do #2 with the exposure (use the spot meter on an off center spot, pan and shoot).

The other thing I've messed with is the sharpness and exposure (ev's) control, if you lower the sharpness (- numbers, I know backwards) and increase the exposure (also - numbers), you get an increased contrast and brightness. It does work and is generally the first thing you do when you edit a picture. The disadvantage is that sometimes you get to much contrast that really looks bad. I resigned myself to shooting with the default settings and tweeking in Photo Shop. YMMV.

Cecil, thanks ever so much for the great tips and the website. I just visited dpreview.com and it blew me away! I never expected anything so in-depth as it is...thanks so much for turning me on to this site. I will have to print out everything and use it as a "normal" person's operations manual!! LOL. Wow...what detail and layman's terminology and examples, etc. It is an outrageous site. It REALLY has me psyched to learn how to use "fooL" this new camera of mine....I did not realize it could do so much. I bought the underwater housing, too, so I will have to master/fool not only the camera, but the new housing to go with it, too. It will be fun to master both and I hope to take some nice shots while we are on Bonaire in May this year...thanks again, Cecil.

Which trash can this year??? LOL. Carole (Shutterbug)

Carole, I have the Canon S30 and love it. It's not quite as wonderful as the S40, but it takes a beautiful picture (when the operator knows what they're doing).