Our Smorgasbord Christmas Tree

We put up our Christmas tree on Monday night for Family Home Evening.  Every year we turn on the Knudsen Brothers and hang our ornaments to Rockin’ around the Christmas tree.  Then we turn on the Christmas lights, off with the room lights, and sing a carol or two followed by a Christmas story.  I have the best wife!  She’s made it a tradition to collect short Christmas stories.  Once the tree is up, she reads a story to the kids every night until Christmas.  She’s great at keeping traditions in our family.  Even if I complain about them, deep down I really like them (including the time to make potato rolls every Thanksgiving).

What would Christmas photography be without a little experiment.  I took 34 pictures below, applied a small border to each one, and overlapped them onto one canvas.  Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year!  I’ll post on the ornaments next time.

Grainy Bark

I liked how worn the trees where on the ridge that we camped on.  They looked old and gnarly.  Many of them looked like they had been struck by lighting.  Split down the middle and burned from the inside out.  I guess it’s a good thing we weren’t up there during a storm.

And a closer crop of the picture to better show the layers of bark cracking and peeling.

The Zoom Blur

Here is another technique I tried out while out hunting.  It’s the Zoom Blur.  Basically, zooming in our out during an exposure that’s long enough to let you capture the motion.  I used a tripod for mine, but you can do it free hand or even use your own side to side, up and down, rotate, zoom in, zoom out, or any combination of movements during an exposure to make some cool pictures.  I liked the pictures I had seen of trees with this zoom blur because it makes them look… Aaaaaaah…  That’s a full chorus of angels Ah-ing.  I tried zooming in, zooming out,with the sun behind the tree, beside the tree, etc.  Here are my favorites from this experiment.

The more blurred or closer I got, the more abstract it became.

This last one made me think of a spider web since the bare branches just continued to multiply and weave together during the zoom blur.

Pictures from Thanksgiving

I’m kicking myself for not breaking out my camera during the Thanksgiving festivities.  I still feel silly toting around this huge camera and trying to look like I know what I’m doing with it… especially at family functions where I should be taking snapshots… not minutes to set up a shot.  I’m going to have to keep my pocket camera handy in the future so that I can whip it out and still capture the moments.  I really should have taken some pictures of all the food too.  I think we counted 26 pies at the Alston feast.

Anyways, here are a couple of my other favorites from our Thanksgiving trip.

For these photos, I applied a new preset (Wedding Fantasy) I found for over at lightroomkillertips.com.  This last picture of the saguaro skeleton was a mixture of HDR (high contrast surrealistic filter in photoshop), pulling the sky from of one of the darker exposure, and apply the wedding fantasy preset above in lightroom.

Happy Birthday to Caleb

Caleb turned 10 on Friday.  That’s three children oven 10 years old now.  Man!  We are getting old.  We give our kids a couple of new privileges when they turn 10.  Caleb’s bedtime is now extended to 9 PM and we set up a new email for him yesterday.  He’s definitely growing up.  Only 9 more years and he will be on a mission!  Crazy…

We gave Caleb a new compound bow for his birthday.  He’s already been practicing with his friend and at Cub Scouts.  So, it was not surprise, when he knew what to do with his new bow.  We just need to get him some bails of straw set up out back now so he can practice all he wants.  He are some pictures of him in action.  I know, I wasn’t worried about the shadows.  I just wanted to capture the action of the arrow flying out and the bow string bent.  He’s a good shot.